Lessons

Lesson Info

Overview of Bridge

So now that we've gone ahead and taken a look at the modular setup, we've got ourselves set up pretty well, let's take a look at the difference between things like folders, favorites, collections and smart collections. Let me go back over to my essentials view. So we have favorites over here, and a favorite is a spot on your computer that is a place that holds your files that you always wanna go back to. I think that everyone should have one of these folders in their computer somewhere. It's called Best Photos Ever, with three exclamation points, okay? 'Cause those are the ones that you're most proud of. Those are the ones that you're most excited about. And if at any time, you want some inspiration real quick, 'cause you don't feel like you have any, you can go into that folder and you can look at all the great things you've ever done. And boom, you're back up. You're good to go. I do have one of those folders. It's called the Best Photos Ever, literally with three exclamation points.

It's the ones that I'm most proud of, and it constantly cycles. Okay, so I don't keep photos in there from that were my best from 2012. That's Blake's little happy portfolio place. And a lot of times only Blake sees it. I don't even think my wife knows I have that. That's my little spot. That would be a favorite that I would wanna add here, because at any time, if I wanna go back to those photos to draw up that inspiration, I can put it in the favorites, and I'm good to go there. But like I said, this is not a cataloging software, so you have to tell it when you want a favorite to be put there. For instance, we're doing this bootcamp course, let me just, if you see that there's a file structure right along the top here, too. This is just like in Windows, which is great. I love Windows. I know, I can probably get apples and tomatoes thrown at me now. Don't throw apples. Just throw tomatoes and be nice. It's just like Windows, in that it shows me, along the top, where I am in that folder structure. So at any point, I can click on that folder structure and go back to where I wanted to go. I'm gonna go back to this lessons here. Let's go back to this one, 'cause that's the folder that we're in. This is the folder that I'm gonna be doing all of the presentation work out just for this very specific one, so I wanna have quick access to that at any time. If I right click on that, you can see here it says, "Add to Favorites." Add that to my favorites, and now this folder at any time I can click on and this is gonna show me all the images that would be in that favorites folder. Or all the folders, even, that would be in that favorites folder. Another really cool thing here is, that if we right click on that you can see, "Reveal in Explorer." You add a favorite there, and you're like, "Where is this on my computer? "I have no idea where it is." Right click. Reveal in Explorer. And it's gonna open up Windows Explorer. And show you exactly where you are in Explorer with that folder. That happens to me a lot. I never lose my best photos ever folder, though. I know exactly where that one is. (laughter) I'm gonna go ahead and narrow that down. Let's say you're doing some client based work or for me, for instance, I can talk about what I do. I don't do a whole lot of client based work, but if I'm doing a big landscape shoot, and that's the current one that I've been working on for the past week to two weeks to develop those images, I can right click on any one of those folders, put it over there and be my favorite. And if I don't want it to ever be a favorite, I can right click and say, "Remove from Favorites," so it's no longer there. So I don't clutter up my favorites. Now, favorites are like best friends. We should only have a couple of them, right? Maybe if you're just that friendly, you have a ton of them. There you can cycle through, you can remove whatever favorites you have in there that you don't want in there that maybe you're just done with that and you don't need that to be your favorite anymore. Folders, on the other hand, this is exactly what the folder structure looks like for your computer. If I were to go ahead and click this down arrow here, that's this PC, that's the PC that I'm working on now. Here's my Windows C drive. Here's my D drive. Here's all the different libraries that are contained in my computer, just like I would see it in Windows Explorer. Exactly like I would see it in Windows Explorer. So this doesn't necessarily change. This just becomes an access point for you to find the things that you might need to find. Then we get to collections. Collections are different than favorites, and they're different than folders, because collections exist only within Bridge. And it's a temporary collection spot for things that you might find your favorites. There's two different types of those. There's a smart collection and there is a regular new collection or just a regular collection that's not smart. Basically, what the regular collection is is, let's just call this Test Collection for this purpose. This is a place that you can drag and drop images from any folders in your file structure, anywhere on your computer, you can drag them and drop them into here and it becomes a temporary resting place for that item. It will not move it from your folder structure. If I go over to my favorites, and I click on this Bridge over here, and let's just say we go into this Kansas City one here. If I were to go over to my collections, and I click and hold on this image and drag it over, notice how it did not move this image anywhere from my computer. It's still there. What this collection is doing, is it's just a cumulative collection spot for all of those things that would be your favorite images. Or an image that you need to have quick access to. Technically, instead of having a favorites folder that has all my favorite images in it, could I have a favorite collection? Absolutely. And that collection, instead of it being one folder that has all those images in it, would just be a collection of where those images are all over my computer in that one spot that only Bridge can see. Instead of a spot on my computer that I can go to and click on in my file structure. So that's a good place to put things as you're working on them. You can use it for many different things. You can use it as a favorites. You can use it as, even just for a single shoot. Let's say you're doing a landscape shoot, and you love 15 of the images from there. And you highlight those and dump them into that collection box, if that's easier for you. The other thing is the smart collection. So if we look at this folder structure that we have here. If we look at, where we are here you see Kansas City and then we see KC. We go to collections, we can make a smart collection. And a smart collection is gonna bring up a dialogue box and ask you some questions. Again, don't run and hide. Just answer them truthfully, and it will hopefully do exactly what you want it to do. If we look it says, "What's the source?" Are we looking in Bridge? Are we looking in a certain folder? And what are we looking for? It's gonna ask you, "Where are we looking for this thing "and when we look for it, what do you want me to look for?" So if we're looking in our Day 1 Intro to Bridge, what's the criteria? Is it file name? Is it date created? It's asking you all these different questions about what you might want to go into this smart collection. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and just say, "Look in Day 1." We're gonna go and say, "Anything that is keyworded "and it contains the word Kansas City." Results. If any criteria are met include all subfolders, include all non-indexed folders. And then just press save. So at this point, it's indexing all those folders, and it's not gonna find anything in there. Why? 'Cause I haven't keyworded anything yet. Now we're gonna move into how we start culling these things and keywording these things and labeling these things so that we can see those things. So we're gonna call this smart collection Kansas City. Now, if I go over to my favorites folder, and I click on Bridge and I were to go into this Kansas City folder and zoom out a little bit here. These are all images from Kansas City. And on the left hand side, we see that we have things called keywords down there. Now by default, these are gonna be keywords that Bridge has set for you when Bridge first opens. For things like events, like birthdays, graduations, weddings. I'm not gonna worry too much about that. I'm gonna delete those. People, it says, "Matthew and Ryan." I do have a son named Matthew, but that's just by coincidence. I can just right click and delete Ryan. I don't know who Ryan is. Places. They already have some default places set up there. I'm really curious as to why they would put San Jose on there. That's Adobe's headquarters if you're wondering. I'm gonna click on places and I'm gonna go ahead and add a keyword here. And I'm gonna call this keyword Kansas City. Drag this down into the places. It's now a sub-place. You can get really specific. Let me just pull this up to places. There we go. You can make a sub-keyword. What I did there by dragging and dropping that and clicking on Tokyo, I then put Kansas City into Tokyo. As far as I'm concerned, we don't have a Little Kansas City there, so I'm just gonna pull this up to places. But if I were to click on Kansas City, I could put a plus sign here for a new sub-keyword for Kansas City and call it Liberty Memorial. So when I look at my images here, and I zoom in a little bit so you can see them, this is a church in Kansas City that as you're driving into Kansas City you can see that church. It's beautiful. So I'll click on all these. Just press and hold shift as I drag across. And I can click Kansas City. So now, all of these will be keyworded with the word Kansas City. This is the Liberty Memorial. It's a huge tall structure. If you're ever in Kansas City, the Liberty Memorial is where you wanna go to take the epic panoramic shot of our, actually you don't need a panorama. You probably only need maybe a 50 millimeter lens to get our whole cityscape in there, but that's our beautiful view of Kansas City. You can just shift click on the top one. Shift and click down here. And now I can keyword this Kansas City and Liberty Memorial. So now, if I set it up correctly, when I go over to my collections and I go to my smart collection, look at that. Anything that's labeled Kansas City is now gonna be in the smart collection. It's constantly looking at what's happening in that folder, and it's going to that folder and it's putting them into that smart collection. So it's smart, because it's always looking for these things. So if I were to go back over to that folder, into where we are here, we have another time I was out in Kansas City doing some street photography. If I were to click on all these, just shift click on all these, label it Kansas City. I've now keyworded all of them with Kansas City. And if I were to go to my collections, my Kansas City collection, if I did it correctly, yes, everything is working out great. I told you I'm making Bridge cool again. We have our Kansas City labeled images in there as well. All within that smart collection. Now, because it's a smart collection, this is just a temporary look at where these are on my computer essentially, right? Because they aren't actually moving into that test collection. That's just a collection, into that smart collection I should say. That's just a cumulative place where anything that's labeled Kansas City would fall into.