Unfortunately, these settings frequently confuse new Bridge users. I’ll look at this problem and offer some solutions and pointers for taking control of Bridge’s display of thumbnails, and making it work for you.

A common question I get goes something like this:

“I opened Camera Raw, and made some adjustments to my files. But, when I view them in Bridge, I don’t see the adjustments – the thumbnails look the same as they did originally.”

Another variation of the same theme:

“When I view my images in Bridge, they all display normally. But, when I click on a thumbnail, it suddenly turns darker.”

Both of these are readily addressed with Bridge’s settings – but you have to know where to look, and why! It is first important to understand a vital piece of information about thumbnails: many image formats, Camera Raw in particular, contain an “embedded” low-res thumbnail inside the image itself – this thumbnail is available for the OS or any application to display quickly. However, the thumbnails are indeed low-res – and are NOT color managed. This is where the trouble comes in.

Adobe Bridge is able to render a color managed thumbnail, including camera raw settings (typically saved as XMP data) in its display. The difference between the embedded thumbnail and the rendered thumbnail is illustrated below:

The rendered thumbnail is color managed, has all the develop settings from Camera Raw applied, and in general is a more accurate, higher quality preview of the image. However, this takes a bit of processing power, and can slow Bridge to a crawl. The ability to use the embedded thumbnail (from the raw file, without any adjustments)can allow Bridge to move much more quickly and responsively, at a cost to the image thumbnail quality.

To see how we control this behavior, let’s start with Bridge Preferences (Edit > Preferences… or Ctrl-K/Cmd-K).

Thumbnails – Performance and Handling

In the preferences dialog box, we see the “Thumbnails” section, and clicking on this section reveals Bridge’s first thumbnail performance tweak: “Do Not Process Files Larger Than:___”

Any files larger than the specified size in Megabytes are not processed at all, and will show as an icon instead of displaying the thumbnail. I’ve found for slower computers, including many laptops, that setting this to 100Mb or 200Mb can prevent Bridge from getting bogged down on those monster files, especially if you have a folder with several large files in it.

Specify Thumbnail Quality

Now, this doesn’t address the original questions I posed above. Where in the world are the settings to control that?

Well, in Bridge CS3 and earlier, there were settings in the preferences dialog box. In Bridge CS4, however, the engineers moved the settings to Bridge’s “Application Bar” which, as we’ve seen in earlier articles, is located below the toolbar at the top of the screen.

In Bridge’s Application Bar, just to the left of the star-shaped drop down for ratings, are two inconspicuous boxes, one with a large checkerboard pattern and one with a small checkerboard pattern. We’ll find our answer here! Not the most obvious location for thumbnail quality, but presumably the developers felt that this would make it easier to change settings on the fly (it does).

If you hover over the icon with the large checkerboard pattern, you see the tooltip: “Browse quickly by preferring embedded images.”

This option completely avoids any rendering or processing, and uses the embedded thumbnail whenever possible. As the tooltip implies, this is the fastest option and is a great timesaver when you’re in a hurry, or working on a power-challenged system.

If you hover over the icon with the smaller checkerboard pattern, you see the tooltip, “Options for thumbnail quality and preview generation.”

Voila! We’ve struck pay dirt. Notice the dropdown triangle, indicating a pull-down menu. The menu has the remainder of Bridge’s options for this topic:

• The first option, “Prefer Embedded,” is the same as the other icon we just reviewed.
• The second option, “High Quality  on Demand,” is one that confuses people. Bridge will use the embedded thumbnail in its preview, until you click on the image. Clicking on an image causes Bridge to generate a higher quality preview as we reviewed earlier.
• The third option, “Always High Quality,” is the most processor intensive, but results in nothing but color managed, fully rendered thumbnails and previews.
• The final option, “Generate 100% Previews,” tells Bridge to begin generating full sized previews for all images in the folder. These images are shown when you preview your files in loupe or slideshow mode (see my earlier tutorial on previewing images in Bridge).

Now, you know the secret behind Bridge’s thumbnail display behavior. More importantly, you also know how to manage Bridge’s performance, so you can adjust the working conditions depending on the system you’re using!

Good luck, and happy browsing!

However, the reason these scripts aren’t installed by default, is that they’ve largely been replaced by Bridge’s new Output work space. With this work space, the Bridge developers have taken a hint from Lightroom’s Output Module, and have created an experience that, well, heads in that direction. As you’ll see, there is still room for improvement; but give the new work space a chance – it is certainly an improvement over the CS3 scripts, and I’m sure you’ll see many ways that it will help make you more productive.

Let’s start in Bridge’s default “Essentials” workspace, and select a group of photos that need to be printed or saved in a contact sheet. Then, from the work space drop down menu, choose “Output:”

This changes Bridge’s panel configuration, and reveals the “Output” panel, which is not visible in any other workspace. We’ll take some time walking through the Output panel, as it has quite a range of sections and features.

Starting at the top, you have two large buttons, allowing you to select from either “PDF” or “Wed Gallery.” We’ll start with the “PDF” selection. Pull down the menu and you can see the range of preset configurations – in this case, we’ll choose 5×8 Contact Sheet.

OK, nothing happened. Nice, huh?

Well, that’s what the next button down, “Refresh Preview,” is for. Click that, and Bridge churns through your files, generating thumbnails and creating a PDF mockup, which it then presents in a new panel called “Output Preview:”

At this point, we can work our way down the panel on the right, changing the configuration of the contact sheet. If you clicked “refresh” a minute ago, and sat there waiting for Bridge to do its thing, you’ll realize that the workflow here involves making your settings in the output panel, then clicking refresh to see the changes. There is no live dynamic preview.

We start with the “Document” tab:

Very basic, you can choose your paper size, including landscape or portrait, or even popular web sizes for your output. One interesting feature here is that you can actually specify a password to open the final PDF, and you can set Acrobat options to disable printing. Be aware that these security settings are honored by Adobe Acrobat, but may be circumvented by other third party PDF readers.

The next tab is the “Layout” tab:

As you can see, this is where we take the basic parameters from the document tab, and go wild. Create rows and columns, spacing and margins to your heart’s content. You can auto-rotate images for best fit, and there is a checkbox to restrict one photo to a page.

Sidebar discussion – the “Repeat one photo per page” would be really really useful if you could create multiple size thumbnails – a’la Picture Package, for example 1-5×7, 2-3×5 – but unfortunately this is not available at all within Bridge. Seems like a hook for a future capability to me.

Further down, we have the “Overlays” tab:

Here, you are able to specify the data which appears along with your images. Big choices here: Filename, Extension, and page number. You can specify font style , size and color.

Continuing with overlay information, we have the “Header” and “Footer” tabs.

Pretty self-explanatory, except maybe for the “Divider” option. This option creates a horizontal rule of one to five pixels thickness across the page to set off your header or footer.

Below the Footer tab, we have “Playback:”

The settings here control the way in which Acrobat will open the final PDF. You can choose to have the file start in Full Screen (the user will be prompted) and can advance pages automatically with transition effects between pages. This can produce a nice result if you chose one of the templates such as “Fine Art Matte” which display one image per page, and this results in a nice slide show.

Finally, at the bottom, we have the “Watermark” tab:

Oddly enough, this is where the “Save” button is located, and where you need to go to create your finished PDF. There is also a checkbox to allow you to view your PDF on saving.

As for the watermark capability, it is pretty fundamental. You can create a text watermark, controlling its color, font, and opacity. No graphics or other identity plate style watermarks are supported.

So, there you have the basics of the workflow:

1. Make your tweaks, hit “refresh,” repeat to taste.
2. When you’re satisfied with the result, scroll down to the “Watermark” tab and click “Save.”

I’d give Adobe a solid “B-plus” for the results, and a “C-minus” for workflow here. The move towards a Lightroom-style workflow is a welcome change from the one-shot scripting of CS3 and earlier, but there is clearly a lot of room for improvement. This is one area I’ll be watching closely in CS5.

Next time, we’ll take a look at Bridge’s other output feature, the Web Gallery.

When you work with Adobe’s creative suite, and manage multiple projects on your computer, you can use Bridge CS4’s “favorites” feature in much the same way as you would create shortcuts in your browser. Bridge Favorites allows one-click navigation to all your commonly used file folders within your system.

When you open Bridge in its default “Essentials” workspace, the Favorites panel appears in the top left of your screen. However, Bridge in its original configuration contains only a few basic entries in the favorites panel: Bridge Home, Computer, Desktop, Documents, and Pictures (if you’re using Windows XP, “My Computer,” “My Documents” and “My Pictures”). This is nice, but it doesn’t reflect the way most of us really work.

For example, I tend to organize a lot of my work into some main categories, and keep the files in folders on my hard drives associated with those tasks. I have separate areas for:

• Camera Raw Import - files that I import from my cameras,
• Projects - which for me are client related folders,
• My Src - which is where I keep a lot of my doodling and miscellaneous artwork,
• PS Battle - where I keep images related to my weekly battles on the NAPP user forums.

I have shortcuts to all these file areas, stored on diverse physical disks, all within the Bridge Favorites panel.

Creating these favorites is as easy as dragging and dropping. For example, let’s say I want to add a “Blog” folder where I keep projects related to my postings here. I would simply navigate to where the “Blog” folder is located, and drag it into the Favorites panel. It’s that easy:

When you drag to the panel, a solid bar appears between or below the existing entries, and you can drop it right into that location to create a new shortcut. Be careful not to drag it directly ON to an existing entry, as that is the method for copying files!

Once you’ve created your shortcuts, you can actually hide the Favorites panel, as there is a way to access it at any time. Just click in the application bar (in the path bar area, click the little downward pointing triangle next to the navigation buttons). All your favorites are listed there in a quick, easy to access pop-up menu:

I strongly recommend you use the “Favorites” feature in Bridge. It is truly a powerful way to navigate your system, and once you’ve set this up to match your workflow, you’ll never be frustrated again clicking through endless levels of folders, hunting for the same old location you’ve used every time.

Today’s tour leads us to the many varieties of viewing, reviewing, and previewing that Bridge offers within its interface. As we’ll see, the options are many, although some of the capabilities are not quite obvious, if not downright cloaked in obscurity.

We’ll begin with the simplest of the viewing modes.

Full Screen Preview: 

Start by selecting one image, or more than one. There must be at least one image selected for this to work. Then, choose View > Full Screen Preview, or press the spacebar. The first selected image zooms to full screen view (or full size view if the image is smaller than your screen).

Navigation: While you are in Full Screen Preview, you can use the left and right arrow keys to navigate through the images. If you selected more than one image, only the selected images are displayed, otherwise all images in the folder are displayed.

Zooming and Panning: Use the “+” and “-“ keys to zoom in and out of your image. Maximum zoom is 800%. You can also use the scroll wheel of your mouse. Or, simply click the image to zoom to 100% at that point. When zoomed in, click and drag to pan the image.

Exit: Press the spacebar again, or press the Escape key to exit.

Full Screen Preview. Quick. Efficient. Not really powerful, but great for what it does.

Review Mode (“Carousel Mode”):

This is one of the coolest new functions in Adobe Bridge CS4. Review mode allows not only browsing, but refining the selection, performing minor edits and ratings, and opening into Camera Raw or Photoshop.

Unlike Full Screen Preview, you need not have any images selected. Having zero or one image selected has the effect of pulling the entire folder into Review Mode, while making a selection pulls in just the selected photos. Just press Ctrl-B (Cmd-B on a Mac) to start. Once you’re in review mode, you see a rotating “carousel” of images that you can browse through with the left and right arrow keys:

While you’re in Review Mode, you can press the ‘h’ key for help. In this mode, you can do all of the following:

Navigation:

• Press the left and right arrow keys to rotate the carousel and bring any of the images to front and center.

Selecting:

• Press the down arrow to dismiss an image from Review Mode, narrowing the selection.
• Press “.” to increase the image rating, or “,” to decrease the rating.
• Press Delete to reject an image, or “0” (zero) to clear its rating.
• Press the 6 trough 9 keys to assign color labels to the image.

Editing:

• Press “[“ to rotate the image 90 degrees CCW, or “]” to rotate 90 degrees CW.
• Press “R” to open the selected image in Camera Raw, Alt-R (Opt-R on the Mac) to open all in Camera Raw.
• Press “O” to open the selected image in Photoshop, Alt-O (Opt-O on the Mac) to open all in Photoshop.

Exit:

• Press Esc to exit.
• Press “C” to create a collection from the remaining images and exit.

As you can see, the Review Mode, or “Carousel Mode” as it is often called, packs some serious power!

Slide Show:

Slide Show preview mode give you the Spartan display mode of Full Screen Preview combined with the capabilities of Review Mode. Plus, it adds a few presentation style options to allow you to create a nice, impromptu slideshow; great for a quick, on the spot review of your images.

As with Review Mode, select specific images or you get the entire folder. Choose View > Slideshow, or press Ctrl-L (Cmd-L on the Mac) to start the slideshow immediately.

As with Review Mode, the “h” key brings up a help screen, and the options are very similar to Review Mode. Additionally, pressing “L” brings up the Slideshow options, which are also available directly from the Bridge window via View > Slideshow Options… or Ctrl-Shift-L (Cmd-Shift-L on a Mac):

Display options:

• Choose to black out additional monitors, repeat the slide show, or zoom back and forth (a rather mundane attempt at a Ken Burns type of effect).

Slide options:

• Specify slide duration, caption overlays, and slide scaling.

Transition options:

• Specify transition styles and speed.

Bridge’s Slide Show Mode doesn’t win any awards for being a fancy slide show creator, but it does give you the ability to provide an impromptu presentation for a client when you are on the spot and don’t have the time to produce something more involved.

There you have it! Three accessible and easy to use ways to view, review, and preview your images from within Bridge. Once again, the depth and breadth of this utility never ceases to amaze.

Not to worry! Apparently the Adobe developers noticed the same thing, and in Bridge CS4, they have introduced a solution: Compact Mode. Switching to Compact Mode in Bridge shrinks the window, but does oh, so much more. In compact mode, the side panels are hidden, and the interface becomes much more streamlined.

You can switch Bridge over to Compact Mode by clicking the icon in the upper right corner of the Bridge Window.

Once in Compact Mode, the first thing you may notice is the absence of side panels and menus. You have a minimal interface, but one in which you can work with thumbnails. This mode was made for Drag and Drop! In fact, you may notice that the compact mode Bridge window “floats” over all windows in the workspace. So, in effect, it becomes almost like a panel in the CS application workspace.

Bridge’s Compact mode features some rudimentary navigation features, including Recent Files functionality and Breadcrumbs, but it does support “Folder Cruising” as we discussed in an earlier tutorial! There is also a Window menu in the upper right corner that controls, among other things, the “Always on Top” feature. There’s also a small Search bar to aid in locating files.

Other than that, it is all thumbnails, with a slider at the bottom to change the size of the thumbs. Just drag and drop into your InDesign document to place files, or into Photoshop to open. The window stays on top, so you can continue to browse and open files as needed.

Is Compact Mode still taking up too much of your screen? How about “Ultra Compact Mode?” That’s right, click the icon next to Compact Mode (It reminds me of a window blind), and Bridge shrinks up into nothing more than a floating bar with one row of icons. From there, you can move it around on the screen into a convenient location, pop open to Compact Mode when needed (click the window blind icon again), or pop open to full screen mode (click the compact mode icon as before).

With Bridge’s Compact Mode (and Ultra Compact Mode), big capabilities do come in small packages!

In the user forums at the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, we get many questions from users who are trying to batch process multiple images. Typically, the object is to convert a bunch of images – from several files to several hundred files. The conversions may be oriented to a specific file type, such as TIFF or JPG, or to a specific size, such as a low res output for proofs, email or web thumbnails, or to perform a specific action such as sharpening or adding a watermark.

The first place people tend to look when confronted with these sorts of tasks is Photoshop’s Batch processing capability. While the Batch command will allow you to perform all these activities, there is an easier way already built into Photoshop – and it is available from Bridge. It is a script, called the Image Processor.

The Image Processor script has several advantages compared to the Batch command. For starters, the Image Processor (we’ll call it “IP” for short) has a great deal of capability already built in, and you can get a lot of work accomplished without creating a single action at all! The IP will allow you to do all of the following easily:

• Create a new file in either JPG, TIFF, or PSD, or all three simultaneously.
• Places the output in a folder of your choosing, creating subfolders for each file type you choose.
• Processes any type of file Photoshop can open, including Camera Raw – use it to create JPG output from your raw files, including adjustments you’ve made.
• Resize your images to fit within a specified maximum boundary you set.
• Convert to sRGB color profile automatically for the web.
• Include Copyright metadata in the output images.

You can run an action as well, as part of the processing, if you choose!

You can run IP from Photoshop, or from Bridge. Running this script from within Bridge allows us another huge advantage over running it from Photoshop:

• Process any set of files you have selected within Bridge. This can include part of a folder, or the results of a search, or a collection.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at the details of how we can put Image Processor to work. First, just for grins, we’ll look at the Photoshop implementation of IP. Then we’ll jump over to Bridge and see how it blows Photoshop out of the water.

In Photoshop, choose File > Scripts > Image Processor… and you will get the following dialog box (we’re just looking at the top part of it for now). Check out section (1), “Select images to process:”

As you can see, within Photoshop, we have several options:

• Use Open Images – if you have images already open in Photoshop, this option is active and you can choose it. Otherwise, it is greyed out.
• Select Folder… – This allows you to choose an entire folder of images from your hard drive. It will select every image in the folder.
• Include All sub-folders – checking this box this will select not just the selected folder, but every image in every subfolder beneath the one you’ve selected.
• Open first image to apply settings – check this box if you are opening a series of camera raw images and want to adjust settings, such as white balance, and have it applied to the entire group of images (not very useful, in my opinion).

Within Photoshop, that’s what you get.

Let’s now consider Bridge, and from here on out we will work with Bridge. We’ll take the IP script one step at a time, and make quick work of it.

Part 1 – Select the images to process

In Bridge, start the process by selecting the images first. You can use any means of selection at your disposal within Bridge. Control/Command click to select individual images, or use Ctrl-A/Command-A to select all with in a folder. Or, create a search and select photos from the results of the search. Or, go to your Collections panel and choose one, several or all files from a collection.

With Bridge, the sly is the limit. Any method of selecting files is fair game. Once you’ve selected your files, from the Bridge menu, choose Tools > Photoshop > Image Processor…:

Notice that Section (1) is now changed. Gone are all the options for selecting photos (you’ve already done that in Bridge). The only option left is the checkbox for opening the first image to apply settings. The rest is already done. Notice that the dialog is now hard-wired to “Process files from Bridge only” – that is exactly what we want.

On to the next step…

Part 2 – Select location to save processed images

In this part, we tell IP where we want the output files to go. You have two basic choices, one being to place them in the same folder, the other being to place them at some other location of your choosing.

In either case, IP will create a subfolder based on the type of file we ask to export (in the next step). Here is our dialog box showing part 2:

As you can see, we have our radio buttons with the two choices mentioned above. When you click on Select Folder, you get the standard system dialog allowing you to choose a folder for output, or create one on the fly. In this case, I’ve selected a folder called “To E-Mail” in my personal folders. We’re ready to move on to….

Part 3 – File Type

This third section is where the work happens, and this is the most complex part of the dialog. We’ll break it apart to see what is happening. Here’s what it looks like:

Under this section, there are three main areas separated by ruled lines. These three areas are activated by the checkboxes, and represent the three types of files that IP can create:

• Save as JPEG – this will create a sub-folder named “JPEG” and will save converted files in that subfolder. There are three options within the JPEG selection:

1. Quality – this is a number from 1 to 12 representing the JPEG quality setting.
2. Convert Profile to sRGB – Converts the color profile to sRGB on output. This is useful for web and email.
3. Resize to Fit – this will constrain the output image to a maximum dimension. Note that the image remains proportional, this will NOT stretch or distort your image. It simply defines the largest dimension that your final image must fit within.

• Save as PSD – this will create a sub-folder named “PSD” and will save converted files in that subfolder.

1. Maximize Compatibility – saves a composite (flattened) version of a layered image for compatibility with programs that can’t read layers (such as Lightroom).
2. Resize to Fit – same as above.

• Save as TIFF – this will create a sub-folder named “TIFF” and will save converted files in that subfolder.

1. LZW Compression – compresses the TIFF file on saving.
2. Resize to Fit – same as above.

Note also that these three file type are checkboxes – you can enable any one, two, or all three at once, and IP will create the output formats you choose!

Part 4 – Preferences

In this section, we have a few miscellaneous options that we can enable, some of which are quite useful:

Run Action – this is an option, it is not required, but can be useful. In this example, you can see I’ve set IP to have Photoshop run my watermark action.

Copyright Info – Here you can enter information which will be written directly into the Copyright field of the image’s metadata. Convenient! However, if you’ve followed my series of tutorials on applying copyright metadata automatically, you probably don’t need this

Include ICC Profile – this option will embed the color profile in the image as it is created. This is important if you are planning to use the image as part of a color-managed workflow.

Let ‘Er Rip!!!

Now, we’re ready to roll. Just click the “Run” button and watch Photoshop do its thing. Or better yet, go have a cup of coffee, or move along to the next job, because this one is taking care of itself! Here’s the dialog, ready to run. In this case, I’ve set IP to save a series of JPEG files for me, in a folder called “To E-Mail,” with quality 10 and a maximum dimension of 800 pixels on either side. They’ll be watermarked, copyrighted, and will be saved in a subfolder called “JPEG.”

Finally, notice the two buttons we didn’t cover? “Load…” and “Save…”? You may have figured out by now, that once you have all these settings the way you want, you can Save them off to a file, and re-load them again later… for an extra-speedy process.

It’s just that simple!

I hope you enjoyed and benefited from this little demonstration of some of the hidden power of Bridge, and the Image Processor script.

This tip comes to us from the Adobe Creative Suite podcast, produced by Terry White (If you haven’t seen this podcast, you should – there are all kinds of episodes featuring all the different applications in the Creative Suite). In the episode I’ve linked, Terry talks about a technique for Adobe Bridge CS4, known as “folder cruising.” Really. It’s actually in the menu! This is such a cool tip I had to post it here. Read on to see what this excellent feature can do for us…

Without further ado, let’s see how this works:

With Bridge CS4, Adobe really amped up the functionality of the Bridge workspaces. For this particular technique, you need to ensure you can see the Path Bar (Window > Path Bar should be checked). The path bar displays that familiar bread crumb trail of folders to give us a visual representation of our navigation trail on the hard drive:

Now, you probably know that you can click on any of the folders listed to move up or down the bread crumb trail. However, here’s the trick: Hover over the “>” symbol between the folders. See? It is a link! And, if you click it, you get the full list of sub-folders contained in that folder, regardless of your current location:

Once you’ve made a folder selection, all you have to do is continue to move the cursor over the “>” symbols and the menus will continue to display. You can quickly and easily cruise through folders, taking any branch at any point!

To exit the “folder cruising” mode, just select “Stop Folder Cruising” from the drop down menu (or click anywhere else in the Bridge window):

What a great tip, I just had to share it! Thanks, Terry!

This is the third part of an ongoing series of tutorials about working with metadata to add copyright data to your images. It is also the first in a series of explorations into the inner workings of Adobe Bridge, the “Swiss Army Knife” of the Adobe Creative Suite. In this exercise, we’ll look at various ways of using Bridge as a tool to modify and apply metadata to your images.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to protect your work – your intellectual property, your images, you art – with copyright notices embedded in the image metadata. Yet, many people don’t take the extra step! My aim here is to give you all the tools to make this EASY… and so it is! Without further ado, let’s dig in.

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at creating metadata templates as a means of quickly applying copyright, author and related information to our images. We used Photoshop to create the metadata templates, and created a Photoshop action to automate the process of adding metadata to our files easily.

In Part 2, we got creatively lazy, and created a script event manager to apply metadata presets (including our valuable copyright data) to every image we open in Photoshop – behind the scenes, automatically.

Now, in part 3, we turn to Adobe Bridge. We’ll see how Bridge can be used to apply metadata to your images without even opening them. This can speed up your work tremendously!

This can be a deep subject, so we’ll split this into three parts below:

1. Viewing metadata in Adobe Bridge
2. Creating and modifying a metadata template in Bridge
3. Automating the process in Bridge

Let’s get started.

Viewing metadata in Adobe Bridge

Bridge is, first and foremost, a file browser, and as such it gives you access to all the files on your hard disks, quickly and simply – and visually. However, Bridge provides much more information about your files than simple OS file browsers like Mac’s Finder or Windows’ File Explorer. One need only take a look at the metadata panel to see more information about your file than your OS would ever reveal (the panel is located in the lower right panel of Bridge’s default “Essentials” workspace, or choose Window > Metadata Panel to reveal it, if it is hidden):

As you can see, you have several sections, starting at the top with basic camera data. This includes your f/stop ad shutter speed, ISO, metering mode, color space, and image dimension, and – isn’t it clever! – very similar to how you might see them on the display of your own camera.

Below that is the File Properties section, showing file name, type, size, creation and modification date, and so on.

In the Camera Data (EXIF) section, you’ll find all the information your camera is able to provide, in concise and easy to see format.

There are several other sections, but the one we want to focus on today  is the IPTC Core section. Notice is is closed by default, you can click the small triangle at the left of the panel to twirl down the section and see the data.

IPTC is the International Press Telecommunications Council, who defines the format and content of image data. The important fact you need to know is: this is where the copyright data lives!

If you go ahead and twirl open the IPTC Core section, you’ll see all the fields we worked with in the previous two sections of this series. There is the Creator, Website, plenty of fields for personal or business contact information, and the Big 3: Copyright Notice, Copyright Status, and Rights Usage Terms.

One other thing you may notice when you view the IPTC Core section… all the fields have a small pencil icon next to them. By clicking on the pencil icon, you can change the metadata in any field by simply clicking the pencil, entering the data, then pressing Enter/Return to complete the edit.

Nice, huh?

Hardly!

Maybe this is useful for small, on the spot edits and tweaks, but it’s hardly the domain of power users and is not the least useful to us in our quest to automate the process.

The metadata panel is a great tool for viewing the image data, but is not the best tool for entering and modifying that data. Let’s take a look now at unleashing the power of the Bridge, and learn the fastest methods for adding and editing the metadata in your images.

Stay with me…

Creating and modifying a metadata template in Bridge

Recall back in Part 1 of this series, where we created our first metadata template within Photoshop? Bridge has virtually the same capability. If you highlight a file in Bridge, and select File > File Info…, you’ll see the File Information dialog box that looks identical to the one we saw within Photoshop:

From here, you can simply follow the process presented in Part 1 to create a metadata template. This panel functions identical to the one within Photoshop CS4.

For creating new templates, however, I encourage the use of Photoshop. Creating a template is best done with a new, empty, untouched document, rather than exporting from an existing document. This will avoid having any extraneous data from an existing image exported into your templates.

Bridge Oddity: It is interesting to note that Bridge includes a second method of editing metadata templates directly, without the baggage of selecting an image. I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS DIALOG FOR COPYRIGHT DATA (I’ll explain in a moment). If you select Tools > Create Metadata Template… or Tools > Edit Metadata Template, you get the following dialog box:

Now, this looks like it would be a great thing, but it is MISSING access to a key field that we might need, namely: Copyright Status! Why would Adobe have two different metadata dialog boxes? I don’t know. Why is this one missing the Copyright Status? Don’t know that either! Let’s hope this is fixed soon, but meanwhile that renders this tool ineffective for creating Copyright metadata templates.

Use the File > File Info… dialog for working with your copyright templates.

Automating the process in Bridge

Once you’ve created your metadata template, it’s time to automate the process. Bridge offers two easy methods of applying metadata to a batch of images:

1. Using the Tools menu on highlighted images
2. Applying metadata during image import

Let’s look at these two processes directly:

Highlight images and use the tools menu

This is very straightforward, and removes all excuses for going back and copyrighting ALL your images right away!! Simply highlight one or more images (use Ctrl-A/Cmd-A to highlight all the images in the current view). Then, select Tools > Append Metadata > {your template} as shown below:

Bridge will now begin tagging all your images using your chosen metadata template, and you can go about your business and do other more important things. This is a great method for going back through your image library and making sure the files are all properly tagged.

Apply metadata during image import

We’re going to take a closer look at the import process in a future article, but this one is for all the people who use Bridge to bring their images from the camera. When you select from the menu: File > Get Photos from Camera… you are presented with this dialog box:

When you see this, select the button that says “Advanced Dialog” (Bridge remembers this choice, so you’ll only have to do this once). The dialog expands as shown below:

If we look more closely at the lower right corner, we see the “Apply Metadata” section, and using “Basic Metadata” we can now enter our Creator and Copyright information.

However…

If you pull down the menu that says, “Template to use,” you’ll see all your saved Metadata Templates, waiting to be applied. Select your desired template and away you go:

Now, when you click on “Get Photos,” all your images will be copied from the camera to your hard drive, and automatically tagged with your Copyright notice during the import process.

In Conclusion…

Setting up a metadata template is a straightforward process, and you typically need only do this once per year (to update the year of copyright). Once you have created and saved your template, Bridge has some excellent tools to allow you to apply the metadata quickly, easily and painlessly. So, get your template created, and don’t leave your images unprotected ever again!

Next time: we’ll look at automating this process with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. (Hint: It’s really easy!)

In my role as moderator on the forums at the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, I read and field many questions on Photoshop, as well as other applications in Adobe’s Creative Suite. One thing I’ve noticed in the discussions and in the frequently asked questions, is that Adobe Bridge is highly underrated and often misunderstood. As one of the best applications money can buy (it’s FREE after all!) the reality is that Bridge has a monstrous set of capabilities, that all to often go untapped by the Photoshop user community at large.

Starting today, and over the next few weeks as a recurring series, I will be bringing you a look under the hood at what I consider the Swiss Army Knife of the Adobe Creative Suite. We’ll look at Bridge’s basic capabilities, as a file browser and launcher, but we’ll dig oh, so much deeper. In fact, if you stick with me, we’ll take the red pill (you do recall Adobe’s code name for CS3?) and we’ll see just how deep this rabbit hole goes!

On the surface Bridge is, at its heart, a media management tool – a combination file browser, previewer and launcher. Some of the basic functions that come with Bridge include:

• Browse disks, folder and files
• Preview images
• Review multi-page layouts
• Preview multimedia files such as audio and video
• Launch files with their associated application

However, Bridge goes beyond simple file management. You can:

• Sort, rate, label and compare images and files
• Group images, Stack images, and Create collections
• Manage metadata including keywords

But Bridge goes beyond even that. As an integral part of the Creative Suite, you can:

• Work with Camera Raw files natively
• Open or Place images and other files in any Creative Suite application
• Automate Photoshop workflow in myriad ways
• Manage Suite color settings

And last but not least, you can create a variety of output such as:

• Slide shows
• Web galleries
• PDF contact sheets

For the techies out there, Bridge is fast, versatile, and knows how to stay out of the way yet be there when you need it. Bridge CS4 is a quantum leap over earlier versions.

Getting the picture? Heck, we haven’t even started yet! As I hinted, over the next few weeks we’ll take on each of these capabilities. We’ll cover the basics, but we’re going to go for the gold and uncover the real power that Bridge places at your fingertips.

For now, to get you started and to give you something to chew on, I’ll leave you with these excellent resources, starting with a nice big compilation of Bridge CS4 goodies:

A plethora of Adobe Bridge tutorials on Phosphors, an Adobe blog

Learning Adobe Bridge on Adobe TV

Adobe Bridge Help and Support Page

Stay tuned for more, as we pull back the curtain on this multi-talented program called, simply, the Bridge.