Beginner's Guide to Adobe Bridge

working on a creative project is difficult especially as the project gets larger you can find yourself swamped in all of your project files images and audio clips as you try to navigate just to find that one image you thought you'd see somewhere on your desktop no your organizational skills aren't to blame it really is just that difficult to keep that overflowing hard drive under control that's where adobe bridge comes into play adobe bridge is a powerful creative asset manager that lets you preview organize edit and publish multiple creative assets quickly and easily edit metadata add keywords labels and ratings to assets and organize your assets using collections it's basically like your own computer's finder or windows explorer but a thousand times better and actually useful adobe bridge is the bee's knees of asset management and today i'm going to show you the basics as well as using tags labels and keywords batch renaming using the advanced search functionality and using collections to group your photos let's start with the basics the first thing we are going to look at is the layout of adobe bridge first things first at the very top you have your toolbar file edit view stacks label tools window and help file helps you control all the different options that you have with your system edit can control any of the undo and redo tools capture settings and color settings your view changes anything to do with the layout of your adobe bridge stacks is its own feature label is to do with the controlling of colors and priority labels tools gives you access to the individual tools that adobe bridge offers and window controls the different panels that are open at one time on the left side of the adobe bridge workspace this is your file manager you have your favorites where you can look at your library your libraries and different folders that are open at one time your folders get to look at the whole computer and all of your options this middle one is the content viewing window this is where your current the current files are in the folder you have selected so for example at this address here just like your finder all of these photos are located at the top here let you choose what viewing workspace you have selected right now i have the essentials workspace selected and this is what we'll be looking at for the duration of this video the library's workspace includes all of the different adobe libraries that they offer where you can copy and paste material and assets filmstrip allows you to view content output allows you to arrange content into print friendly canvases metadata allows you to look at the different types of metadata included in the images and keywords allows you to sort it come images by keywords and options just below the toolbar are all our actions we can go back in the path we can go to any of the parent folders we can have a look at the recent files this boomerang icon will take us to adobe photoshop get photos from camera will allow you to import photos from your sd cards from your cameras the refine option will allow you to review and batch rename files camera raw is adobe's camera editing app and will allow you to open and encode images and this is the rotation buttons which allow you to rotate an image left or right on the right side of the adobe bridge frame you have the preview feature which allows you to view the image that you've selected this is also connected to the publish feature which allows you to directly publish uh your files to adobe stock contributor and adobe adobe portfolio which are two of adobe's other apps that cooperate with adobe bridge down the bottom here we have metadata this contains stuff like the details of the camera that the file was taken on and the dimension of the photos the color modes and the file type it also gives you a summary of the key details of the photo the keywords tab allows you to assign keywords to events uh to files so you could have a keyword which is for example photos of the forest and tag this photo in it on the right hand side we have the keywords tab this allows you to assign user made keywords to different photos so for example we have here a photo of the forest so we could assign this the forest keyword and down here we also have a photo alpha forest and we could assign this the forest keyword down the bottom left hand corner we have our export tab which allows us to bulk export different types of images and convert them this is more useful to for raw camera file types collections which allows you to make basically albums of photos and filter which allows you to filter photos by keyword orientation aspect ratio and camera raw down the bottom here we have our different file content viewer options which basically adjust the uh way we see content in this window here you can change the size of the icons whether the icons are matched to a grid uh whether we're viewing them as details which have summaries about the files or whether we're viewing them as lists we can also select whether they are actually tiles just the thumbnails without the file names and have control for albums folders folders are a key part on understanding how adobe bridge works it's basically like your file explorer if you ever want to add a folder to adobe bridge you can either locate it on the side panel here by going through your hard drive or you can find the folder that you want to go to inside of your windows explorer or finder and copy the address you can then paste the address up here in adobe bridges address bar so bring you straight to it to save and bookmark a folder for later use you can right click on the folder and then click add to favorites then when you go to the favorites tab at the top left you'll be able to click on that link to go there straight away navigating through folders is also really simple with adobe bridge you can double click a folder to open it up and then you can click this back button to go back and then if you want to go back into the folder you just came from you can click the go forward button you can also click any of these folders along the breadcom trail if i want to go back to my pictures folder i can click on it and it'll take me there advanced file selection is an easy way to navigate the workspace as well as select files that you want to use for manipulation using the control button on a windows machine you can hold and select multiple files at once to select a file in a line you can select the first file hold shift and select the last file this also works for extending the length of a line like so to select all files in a directory hold control and a and to deselect all files in a directory hold ctrl shift and a since adobe bridge is meant for large amounts of photo and file storage there is a review feature if you go into the folder of photos you want to review for example stock photos and then go up to the top left here and click on refine review this will open a mode which allows you to click left and right to be able to preview the images this will select all of the images in the folder if you want to directly add an image to a collection you can click this button if you want to remove the image from your selection you can also click this down button here which will drop the photo out i can also use this image to zoom in and magnify certain parts of the image when i exit review mode i can see that only the ones that i didn't drop out are selected and i can move these around as i wish the first process we will cover today is the process of tagging also known as reviewing or rating at the very top here in the workspace selection bar select film strip this allows you to view images in a nice big preview box you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to go through the images slowly the process of rating images is by giving them a star count from one to five to allow you to later organize them on the photos you like the most and the photos you like the least so if i want to give this photo here a rating of three stars i can click three this will give up here this image a rating of three stars and it'll later allow me to sort it i can also do this by clicking on an image going up to the top here selecting label and choosing the rating that i want to give it no raiding are the or all of the ratings have a different assigned hotkey no reading is control 0 or command 0 on a mac system 1 star is control 1 2 star is control 2 and 3 star is control 3 and so on so upon the process of review i can click on the image i want if i want to give this image a 4 star rating click control 4 then i can click the right arrow key to move over to the next image and rate this one say i want to remove a rating i can hover over the image i want to remove it from and click control 0 or i can click the little cross out button down the bottom here this allows me to remove a rating quickly from an image after i've finished rating all of my different photos i can then come back to this screen here using the filter window on the far left i can then sort my images by what i want to see so if i want to see all of the nine images that have a four star rating i can check this box and it'll only show me these ones if i want to see all of the images that have either a 4 star rating or a 5 star rating i can click both the the filter system allows me to effectively view photos and decide which ones i want to use if i want to show all of the photos again i can click clear filter or i can unselect my boxes if i want to keep a filter pinned while i navigate through my menus i can select only photos with a five star rating for example pin the filter and then navigate through all my photos so it only shows me the photos that have the fill that have a five-star rating which there are none in this subfolder the next feature we'll be going over is the battery name feature the battery name feature is basically used for renaming a whole bunch of files to a format that you'd like if i look at my pictures in here in memes i can see that all of these files are randomly named from their downloads if i want to rename all of these files i can use the battery name feature this especially works well for large folders with thousands of photos to select all of these photos in this directory we can use control a or command a on a mac then i can come up here to the refine button open it up and click batch rename or i can use the keybind ctrl shift r or command shift r on a mac highlight all of the photos and then hit ctrl shift r this will open up the battery name window i have the option here to choose from a bunch of different preset presets that i've loaded you can save presets for later to be able to rename multiple folders with different files here's my destination folder i can rename all of these files in the same older which in the same folder which just changes the name of the files in this directory here i can move them to another folder in the process and then rename them or i can copy these photos leave these ones with the original name and put new ones in with different in a different directory with different names i'm going to rename this in the same folder down here is the formatting of the names this is where you can set what you want the new files to be this is the options pane which allows you to preserve the current file name in the xmp metadata which allows you to basically save a copy of the photo of the old name in the metadata and the preview section shows what all of the new files will be called say i want to rename all of these photos to meme underscore and then iterate through the different sequences i can do that by getting rid of all of this stuff here starting off with the text option i can type meme if i want to then have another description put underscore and see down the bottom it's showing us in real time what the files will be renames to say i also wanted to include the date here i can click on the drop down and then change the different date if i want to change the date to for example uh the date created i can click on this option here which allows me to specify the date created or i can put today's date yesterday's date or the last time the file was modified i'm going to put today's date this is the format of the date in australia we use date date month month year year so i'm going to use that one see down the bottom here we have already an updated version of what the new files will look like the problem is is that there's no special like indicator each file has at the moment it's just meme and then underscore the day to add a sequence number first we want to click add click on text and go down to sequence number three digits means that there will be three digits that iterate through two digits means that would be two and one means there will be one and so on this is especially good for large amounts of files i'm going to use two digits see here how the date 0709 has now combined with the sequence number we should add a separator to do that we can click the plus button here to add a new text field highlight it and click underscore now we have meme underscored the date underscore 01 which means it's the first file made from all the memes on this day to preview all of the changes i'm going to make to the files in the directory i can click the preview button this shows here all of the new file names that will be created click ok and rename now all of the files in the folder will be renamed 01 02 03 04 and o5 collections are another important feature of adobe bridge if i look at all of the photos i took today i can see that there are some of some plants some of my dog liberty and some of my birdman if i wanted to take all of the photos in this collection in this folder here and add them to a collection or sometimes known as an album i can do that in the bottom left-hand corner we have the collections window if we navigate to the collections window and click new collection i can then rename it something i want to call it i'm going to call it libby after my dog if i navigate back to where i was and instead of today i can now select all of these images to add all these photos into a collection after i've selected them i can drag them to the collection i want to add them to for example libby now when i click on this collection all of these photos of my dog will be there keywords are similar to collections and you can use them to group photos on the right panel here i can see that there are metadata and keywords click on the keywords tab i can then assign different keywords to different files clicking the plus button allows me to create a new keyboard a keyword if i say wanted to have a keyword with all of the photos that have blue in them i could add the color keyword and then click on it again and add a sub keyword which is blue i can then use this keyword and assign it to whatever photos i wish to to now add a keyword to an image i can click on the image i want to add it to so say for example i was using all of the blue images in this category click on the image i want to add it to and then click on the keyword to add it this file here will now have keywords stored in the attributes i can also do this with other images so if i click on all of the blue images then i can assign them blue or i could use control and individually select the photos that are blue then i can click on the blue keyword to assign it to all of them if i want to see all of my photos assigned with the keyword blue i can go down to the filter section scroll to keywords and select blue and this will show all of the photos with the blue attribute i can also do this for multiple keywords we can create the orientation group and then add the portrait attribute as well as the landscape attribute now i can select all of the images that are landscape for example this one this one this one and this one and give them the landscape tag and then i can add all of the pictures that are portrait and give them the portrait tag now when i saw a search by keyword i have more options i can sort by landscape photos i can sort by landscape and blue photos or i can sort by just portrait photos depending on the amount of boxes i have clicked down here metadata is the parameters stored within the files code we can view this by going down to the bottom right and clicking on the metadata tab there are different parameters that we can view and it depends on the camera that took the photo and whether the image has been copied or stripped of its metadata we can see that this photo here was taken by an iphone 12. it also gives us the exposure brightness level focal length whether the flash fired the date that it was taken and the white balance as well as many different other parameters about the camera on cameras that support it you can also see your gps parameters which i have closed here for video files you can also see different audio and video parameters and down the bottom here you can add your own parameters the metadata just gives a summary of the file and allows you to sort and view files based on their metadata adobe bridge is a fantastic software for digital asset management it works well with other of adobe's softwares like premiere and photoshop really the most effective part about adobe bridge is its photo management being able to change metadata and add to collections on the fly is really helpful in organizing large amounts of photos adobe bridge isn't an overly large program but there are some very niche features which i haven't explained to find out more about adobe bridge on the fly you can hover your cursor over different features which will explain to you what they do in the tooltip or you can use the help feature thank you for watching this video on adobe bridge hopefully you enjoyed it and it allowed you to learn how to use this great photo management software foreign

Channel: Blake Buddingh

Views: 1,109

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Id: C-v8t1sUh_0

Length: 25min 28sec (1528 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021