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rmrubin
Known Participant
February 26, 2026
Open for Voting

Export and import Bridge collections

  • February 26, 2026
  • 返信数 2.
  • 52 ビュー

Hello Adobe Team,

I’d like to request a feature that allows users to export and import Bridge collections along with their manual sort order.

Currently in Adobe Bridge 2026:

  • Manual sort order for folders and collections is stored in a central database with machine-specific IDs.
  • Copying .filelist or collection XML files alone does not preserve the visual/manual order between machines.
  • There is no user-facing way to export/import collections in a portable format.

This limitation makes it difficult for users who:

  • Work across multiple computers. (I use two computers at home and in photo lab at the college I may use a different computer each time.)
  • Collaborate in teams
  • Need to back up curated collections with specific manual ordering

By contrast, in Lightroom Classic, exporting and copying a catalog preserves the sort order, demonstrating that Adobe already has a functional model for portable, ordered collections. The Bridge approach would be somewhat different as Bridge uses the local computer’s file system rather than importing images into a collection, but it would greatly enhance portability especially for those users who prefer the interface of Bridge & Camera Raw and find it easier to work with them because you don’t need to import images.

A proposed solution could be:

  • “Export Collection” → saves file references, metadata, and manual sort order in a portable format
  • “Import Collection” → restores the collection on another machine, remapping file paths if needed

Further enhancement would be

  • Enable easy exporting to and importing from a known location in the cloud for a user.
  • Export from Bridge and import into Lightroom Classic and vice versa. 

This would greatly improve workflow continuity and make Bridge collections truly portable across machines.

Thank you for considering this enhancement.

 

      返信数 2

      R
      rmrubin作成者
      Known Participant
      February 27, 2026

      Collections are an extremely important organizing feature in both Adobe Bridge and Adobe Lightroom Classic. They allow you to store your images in one standard way (such as by date shot) and yet reorganize or group them in myriad other ways. You can place the same image in many different collections. A shot of a bird in Kenya can be in collections of all birds, African birds, Kenyan birds, and of images from your trip to Kenya.

      Manually sorting collections allows you to organize the images in a collection as an aid to design or for presentation to others. The need to export and import collections and their sort orders is especially needed in two situations. Many photographers keep duplicate copies (or more) of all their images. Images take up considerable space. Many of us use multi-terabyte hard drives to store our images. In my own case, I use both a desktop computer and a laptop. Each has a designated image hard drive to accompany it. I keep the images in sync on both external drives. In addition, for recent years I also keep copies in folders on the local internal hard drives on each machines. Thus, there are four copies of all recent images.

       I use the desktop primarily at home and the laptop when traveling. Manually sorting images sometimes requires carefully made decisions. In reproducing them from one machine to the other, it is easy to make a mistake. In my case, I have set up each external drive to have the same Windows drive letter on both my machines. That makes copying collections from one machine to the other fairly straightforward, but the manual sort order cannot be copied. Currently, it has to be reproduced by hand.

      The other situation occurs when you take the same external hard drive from one machine to another. I work mainly on my Windows computers, but when I go to print at the photo lab, the computers are all Macs. I may use a different machine each time. I would like to organize files for printing in collections. But it is hardly convenient to port a collection from a PC to a Mac and many photographers would have no idea how to do that.

      My current request is for an export-import function. This request is especially important as there is no easy workaround for reproducing manual sort orders other than doing it all over again. There are several other features that could be added for collections that would make them much easier to use:

      1. Let the user designate the directory where Collections and UserSort directories are stored. That directory should be the main (highest level) directory for images. There could be a default option to presume that all images in any collection are in subdirectories of this designated main images directory. It would then be unnecessary to store the full path of an image in the .filelist file. The path relative to the main images directory would be sufficient. This feature would make it possible to export-import a collection to a different main images directory (for example, on a different drive) on the same computer. When importing a collection on either the same or a different computer, the target import location would be the main images directory. It would be unnecessary to specify further where the images are to be found.
      2. Update collections automatically when a file name is changed, when its directory name is changed, or when a file is moved. Currently, Bridge prompts you to fix a collection if the images it designates can’t be found. This fix function works fairly well. If a directory name has changed (or is on a different drive), once you correct one image, other images in the same directory that are also in the collection appear. But automatic synchronization upon name or location changes would be wonderful.
      3. If you edit an image from a collection in Camera Raw and save it with a different name or type (as when going from a raw image to a JPG), provide three options: 1) keep only the original image in the collection, 2) keep both images in the collection, 3) replace the original image in the collection with the new image.

      If there is sufficient response to the current request, I can post these feature requests separately.

      R
      rmrubin作成者
      Known Participant
      March 10, 2026

      Tonight, I was reminded of the seriousness of the problem. I had taken many photos of a large complex painting in Chicago. I planned to show them to two friends in a Zoom conference. The photos I took were more than I planned to show and they were not taken in the order that made a coherent presentation. I selected 48 photos in a collection and manually ordered them. I could easily copy the collection from my laptop to my desktop, but arranging the 48 in the same order on the target  machine would have been time-consuming and error prone, so it didn’t happen. I started the Zoom on my desktop tonight, but as I prepared to make the presentation, I realized  I was on the machine that did not have images in the collection in the correct order. So I had to switch my Zoom connection to the then idle laptop (which took several  minutes while my friends waited).  Collections are a valuable way of organizing images for different purposes without replicating them. Why they are not fully portable is a mystery.    

      E
      ExUSA
      Legend
      February 26, 2026

      Export to what? Are you talking about moving files to a folder or exporting a CSV file or ????

      Bridge doesn’t use a database and files wouldn’t be in the same locations on a different computer, so how do you handle that? Remapping file paths isn’t going to work without forcing manual location of files. Remember that if you move files outside Lightroom, there is no automatic remapping of location.

      What you want isn’t possible.

      R
      rmrubin作成者
      Known Participant
      February 27, 2026

      The entries in a collection are stored in a “.filelist” file (a file with XML content) in the Collections directory under the directory for whatever version of Bridge you are using in the AppData/Roaming/Adobe directory for your user profile. This file can be ported to another location that has the same images in the same directory structure. Nevertheless, the high-level directory structure (and on Windows machines, the drive letter) may be different. If you take an external harddrive from one computer to another, it may have a different drive letter on Windows and may be identified differently on two Mac computers (in going between a Windows system and a Mac, the location identification will inevitably differ). The export function would simply copy the “.filelist” file of a collection to a user-designated location (a thumb drive, an external drive, the cloud, etc.). The import function would prompt the user for the high-level structure, if different (and the drive letter, if significant). The import should warn the user if the target location doesn’t exist and, perhaps also, if any of the images in the collection cannot be found in the target location (with an option to ignore).

      Currently, porting a collection can be done manually. The user can scan and replace the drive letter or other location information in each “.filelist” file. Furthermore, a third party could write software to implement the porting of collections. What cannot be done manually or by a third party that does not have access to Adobe internals is to port the manual sort order of a collection. The manual sort order in Bridge 2026 is stored in a directory called UserSort. The sort orders for collections are numbered XML files: UserSort.xml,  UserSort 1.xml, User Sort 2.xml . . . UserSort n.xml. The Index.xml file in that folder tells which sort goes with which collection. The problem is that the UserSort n.xml files refer to images by hexadecimal key (perhaps for performance reasons) and this key differs from one computer to the next (and perhaps for each user on a computer). To export a manual sort order, the export function might resolve the machine-specific keys to the file name and path of the images they represent. The import function would then resolve the textually identified images in the export file to machine-specific keys on the target machine.

      Adobe might consider producing an API that would allow third parties to resolve the keys to file names and paths, but Adobe is not a free product like Thunderbird for email. Adobe’s customers deserve to have tools that maintain consistency across platforms. In another post, I’ll explain the importance of collections and why porting them and their manual orders is so important

      E
      ExUSA
      Legend
      February 27, 2026

      I’m aware and probably more knowledgeable than you about how Bridge stores data. I’ve written dozens of scripts and yes moving collections is a requested feature, but one that is difficult or impossible to do because file paths change between computers. By the time you manually rebuild a collection you might as well just recreate it.

      Let’s be honest here, the Bridge team can barely handle keeping the application afloat. This is unlikely to ever be implemented for both technical and practical reasons.

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