Folder Cruising in Adobe Bridge CS4

I’ve mentioned that Bridge is the Swiss Army Knife of the Adobe Creative Suite. Today, we start to delve into some of the inner twists and workings of Bridge, and we’ll start to see how this is oh, so much more than a typical file browser. There are pleasant surprises lurking behind every corner of this amazing program!

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:

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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:

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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!

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

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

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