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Adobe Releases Long-Awaited Update to Bridge

Today, Adobe did something that many users had long thought would never happen, release a major update to the beloved Adobe Bridge. For years, users have speculated about the demise of the file management application, many believing that Adobe had planned to shutter it sometime soon. While Bridge might not be the most used application in Adobe’s lineup of Creative Cloud apps, it has a very loyal fanbase of users that use Bridge as a core part of their workflows.

So needless to say, today’s updates comes as a major relief to many Adobe customers who rely heavily on Bridge’s time-saving features. Below is a list of some of the updates you can expect to see in the latest version, but keep in mind that while this update is a major step forward for the app, their team sees this release as a “stepping-stone” for more updates that they are planning for 2016.

Automated Cache Management

The central cache of Adobe Bridge stores thumbnails, previews, and metadata information in a database. This database improves the performance when users browse or search files. However, the larger the cache, the more disk space it uses. Cache preferences help you manage the trade-off between performance and cache size. We have worked on improving purging cache capability, which is an existing feature in Bridge. In this update, automatic purging of stale cache items has been enabled when the application is idle.

We are also providing a cache compaction option to set up cache clean-up at exit in case the database size increases beyond a certain size. Both these options improve performance of the application and help keep the cache and database clean over extended periods.

On-Demand Thumbnail Generation

To improve the responsiveness of Bridge when you are browsing through a large set of assets, we have made improvements to the way the thumbnails, previews, and metadata are extracted/generated. Now when you select a folder, the thumbnails/previews are extracted on priority for only the on-screen assets. The thumbnails for the remaining files are either generated on demand (when you scroll down/up) or when the application is idle. The metadata extraction happens on priority for all assets, thereby enabling the filter panel and search to become functional sooner.

This change enables you to work with bulky folders without any performance issues like hangs and not-responding states. With this change, you will now have a fully updated Filter panel even before all the thumbnails/previews are generated. This will also enable you to search for the files even before all the thumbnails/previews are generated.

Import From Device Option on Mac

On Mac OS 10.11.x, Bridge CC did not recognize the following types of devices:

  • iOS mobile devices
  • Android mobile devices and digital cameras connected in PTP (Picture Transfer Protocol) or MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) mode

In this update, an alternative to import media from these devices has been provided. You can now choose File > Import From Device to import media from the devices.

Note: This is a Mac only feature and launches Apple Image Capture to bring files from devices into Bridge.

Other Significant Updates

We also reinstated Autostack Panorama/HDR feature. Given our focus was on stability and performance of Bridge, we have made significant updates to the core technology components. This will set the foundation for a technology platform to enable future development and modernization of Bridge.

To learn more about this update to Adobe Bridge, take a look at the Press Release on Adobe’s blog.

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