Photoshop CS4: The Missing Manual

Appendix C. Using Adobe Bridge

As digital images start to pile up on your hard drive, the ability to sift through them quickly and efficiently becomes more and more important. Enter Adobe Bridge CS4, an image-browsing and organizing program that’s been shipping with Photoshop for several years. Browsing through your images in previous versions of Bridge was a painfully slow process, and the program’s workspace wasn’t very intuitive. But in CS4, Bridge got a speed boost, a flattering makeover, and a new Review mode (Using Review Mode) that’ll make photographers squeal with joy.

In the following pages, you’ll learn the basics of browsing, importing, and rating your images in Bridge. By the end of this appendix, you’ll be able to find your favorite photos and plop them into a super-slick slideshow in no time.

Browsing Your Photos

If you’re working in Photoshop, you can open Bridge by clicking the Launch Bridge button in the Application bar (The Application Bar)—it looks like a square with the letters Br inside it. If Photoshop isn’t running, you can double-click the Bridge icon in the Adobe Bridge application folder (on a PC, go to Start → Programs → Adobe Bridge CS4). Either way, you see the window shown in Figure C-1.

The Bridge window shows you a variety of info about your images in collapsible panels. You can use the Folders panel on the left to navigate to a specific spot on your hard drive to view the images stored there. When you click a folder in this panel, Bridge displays its ...