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How to Manage Thumbnails in Adobe Bridge

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CaptainDan

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There are many opportunities to use Adobe Bridge to quickly review photographs to see where you are with your shooting. For example, last night we experienced a Super Blood Moon Eclipse and as I was taking my photos, I continued back and forth from our back yard to my computer to analyze what I had shot. As you may be aware, nighttime photography is full of challenges and having the ability to flip through photos and look at camera specs is quite valuable.

In this post, I’m going to discuss the world of thumbnails in Adobe Bridge. There are a few neat tools we can use to find out and display information about our photos and even more methods to view our thumbnails.

Resizing Thumbnails​

The very first and most simple task to complete is resizing the thumbnails Bridge gives you. If you open up Bridge and take a look at your thumbnails in the center content panel, you should see something that looks like the screenshot below.

adobe-bridge-thumbnails-panel.jpg

Now, if you use the slider below the thumbnails, you can shrink and enlarge your view of them.

shrink-grow-thumbnails-bridge-slider.jpg

While the slider works well, it can be a bit cumbersome due to its small size, especially if you have trouble with your eyesight. I prefer to use my keyboard when shrinking and growing thumbnail sizes. To do this, I hold down the Ctrl key and click either the “+” or “” keys respectively. If you prefer to use your mouse, you can always click on the little icons on either side of the slider as well. They accomplish the same task as sliding it back and forth.

Sorting Thumbnails​

Last night, I took a good number of photos. Many of them were okay, but many of them were less than stellar. When viewing them after I was finished shooting, I wanted to sort each image by quality (in my opinion). To do this, I merely dragged the images around and dropped them in an order to best to worst. If you take a look at the screenshot below, you can see that once you begin clicking and dragging, the clicked thumbnail begins moving with your mouse and vertical lines appear between photos where the image would be positioned.

sort-thumbnails-manually-adobe-bridge.jpg

The minute I dropped my first image, I created a “custom” sort order and Bridge updated the sort drop-down box to read “Sort Manually.” You can see where that’s located below. The name of the sort method is listed directly below the search field. It’s a bit tricky to see because it’s not actually a box. It’s merely a word(s) with a tiny arrow to the right of it.

thumbnail-sort-options-in-bridge.jpg

Also, if you take a look at the screenshot above, you can see all the other sort choices you’ve got in regards to your thumbnails. Once you’ve manually sorted, you can always select another option to view your images differently. If you change your mind and want to see your custom sort once again, simply click the drop-down box and choose “Manually” from the bottom and Bridge will display your images the same way you previously set them up. It remembers your custom order.

Also, if you’d like to reverse any sort order, all you need to do is click the small arrow that’s to the right of the drop-down box. That will change the order of your sorted thumbnails.

Viewing Thumbnail Metadata​

One of our topics of conversation last night, as we were standing in the dark taking photos of the moon, was how in the world we were going to determine which camera configuration resulted in the best and highest quality photographs. As the discussion progressed, I kept my calm because I knew that I could always download the images from my camera using Adobe Bridge and then view all my metadata inside of it. The thing is, there’s a few methods of going about reviewing this data.

The first method of viewing image metadata is to simply click on each thumbnail and to take a look over to the “Metadata” panel in the right column.

metadata-panel-in-bridge.jpg

While this method does give a thorough overview of image metadata, it’s a bit slow. In today’s world, we sometimes don’t need to look at every single detail. We oftentimes only need a glance at what’s important at the moment. This is where Adobe Bridge shines.

If you head up and click on the “Edit > Preferences” menu, a dialog box will appear.

preferences-menu-bridge.jpg

Inside this dialog box, go ahead and click the “Thumbnails” selection in the left column. From there, you should see a few interesting check and drop-down boxes.

preferences-dialog-adobe-bridge.jpg

The first feature I would like to show you is called “Show Tooltips.” If you check this box off, click the “OK” button and return to the Bridge interface, you can roll over an image and certain information will appear as, what they call, a tooltip. Take a look below.

displaying-tooltip-in-bridge.jpg

As you can see, inside this tooltip, we can view the filename, the date created, date modified, file size and the image dimensions. That’s somewhat helpful.

Now, if we head back into the “Edit > Preferences > Thumbnails” dialog box, we can see a few drop-downs that hold all sorts of information that’s for display below our thumbnails. As an example, I’m going to check off each box and choose what I’d like to appear below each image in the Bridge content panel.

thumbnail-details-metadata-bridge.jpg

As I go about checking off each box and making my selection from the drop-down, I get a live view of how the information would appear below my thumbnails. Of course, you should choose your own metadata as you go about making your selections. I’m only doing this as an example. In my case though, I’ve check all four boxes and decided that I wanted to see the exposure, focal length, color mode and date created for each image. This is extraordinarily helpful in situations such as the one I had last night, where I wanted to quickly view my best shots and the parameters that made them so good. In my daily shooting and reviewing though, I don’t generally use this extra information, so I like to keep these boxes unchecked.
 
Phoenix1

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What Are the Two Icons Inside the Thumbnails in Adobe Bridge?​

I’ve worked in Adobe Bridge for a while and I have noticed that there is usually one icon that sits inside the upper right corner of the image thumbnail that I’ve edited in Camera Raw. The icon is gray and round and it looks like there are two arrows inside of it with two black lines. What does this icon mean?

My second question has to do with another icon, but this time the icon looks similar, but it’s got the crop tool shape inside of it. What’s this?

Also, like I said above, after I edit a picture inside of Camera Raw, one or both of these icons appear in the thumbnail in Bridge. But if I go into Camera Raw and use the Reset Camera Raw Defaults menu item to reset the image to its original state, that icon is still there. I can’t seem to get rid of it. Why not?
 
CaptainDan

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Phoenix1 said:
I’ve worked in Adobe Bridge for a while and I have noticed that there is usually one icon that sits inside the upper right corner of the image thumbnail that I’ve edited in Camera Raw. The icon is gray and round and it looks like there are two arrows inside of it with two black lines. What does this icon mean?

My second question has to do with another icon, but this time the icon looks similar, but it’s got the crop tool shape inside of it. What’s this?

Also, like I said above, after I edit a picture inside of Camera Raw, one or both of these icons appear in the thumbnail in Bridge. But if I go into Camera Raw and use the Reset Camera Raw Defaults menu item to reset the image to its original state, that icon is still there. I can’t seem to get rid of it. Why not?
I have tons of experience with both Bridge and Camera Raw and here is what I can tell you. The first icon you mentioned (some people call this a button – I don’t know why) indicates that the file in question has been edited in Camera Raw. That’s all that means. This is the one with two lines and the arrows that I’m referring to. The next icon; the one that looks like the crop tool, simply means that you must have cropped the image in Camera Raw. You can have either one of these icons show in the thumbnail or both. They’re merely indicators that something’s been done to the file. They don’t appear anywhere in the final image, so don’t sweat it.

Next, about the fact that you can’t get rid of these icons when you revert the file back to its original state. All the icon tells you is that there’s what’s referred to as a “sidecar file” in existence. If you browse to the folder where you’re keeping the file in question, you’ll see the file sitting there as well as the XMP file. If you delete that XMP file, you’ll notice that those icons disappear, along with any edits you made in Camera Raw. That file is where the change data is stored.

Now, an accompanying XMP file is only created for RAW files. If you shot a JPEG file and edited that in Camera Raw, the change data is stored in the metadata for the file itself, so you won’t see any sidecar file. I’m not exactly sure how to remove the icons in this case, even after you revert the file back to its original state. I’ll need to look into this some more.
 
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