Question
A great companion program for Bridge
If you need broader file-format support than offered by Lightroom but suffer from performance problems in recent Bridge versions – Eagle(.cool) might be a great companion-app for you.
I continue using Bridge to cull RAW images, to access ACR and to batch process images. To store and retrieve, files, I recently switched to Eagle – a visually super polished and very fast app that supports more than 100 file formats, RAW, Adobe formats, Vectors, even 3D formats.
This app will not be for you, if you cannot live without keywording in EXIF and XMP: Eagle uses its own tagging and file annotation in JSON format, which for our particular use-case (sending images with metadata to a web-project) is even more suitable. You'll have the advantages of a typical database tool without running a database: Rename a keyword? Just press F2, and all images in all folders and collections that hold this tag will update: Try that in Bridge… What's also very helpful in our situation, is that one can easily share libraries via cloud-services (all data needs to live on local disks, though). This can be a great option for a small team.
You will also not like Eagle, when you insist on using your OS file system to access files. Eagle imports (=physically duplicates) your files into its library and creates a flat collection of indexed folders that only the Eagle app can make sense of. You can, however, import folders so that they within the Eagle app mirror what you are used to. Once imported, there's no link to your source files. You can create a backup or delete these files. If you, however, want your data out, you can export folder trees back to your disk.
Until a few years ago, giving up on my precious "os-native" file structure would have been a major headache for me. But then tools like Notion, Coda or Linear snuck into my work-life. Apps that within their database give you fantastic tools that let you structure work and thoughts and numbers, but that live as a collection of databases on edge storage around the globe.
This app will not be for you, if you cannot live without keywording in EXIF and XMP: Eagle uses its own tagging and file annotation in JSON format, which for our particular use-case (sending images with metadata to a web-project) is even more suitable. You'll have the advantages of a typical database tool without running a database: Rename a keyword? Just press F2, and all images in all folders and collections that hold this tag will update: Try that in Bridge… What's also very helpful in our situation, is that one can easily share libraries via cloud-services (all data needs to live on local disks, though). This can be a great option for a small team.
You will also not like Eagle, when you insist on using your OS file system to access files. Eagle imports (=physically duplicates) your files into its library and creates a flat collection of indexed folders that only the Eagle app can make sense of. You can, however, import folders so that they within the Eagle app mirror what you are used to. Once imported, there's no link to your source files. You can create a backup or delete these files. If you, however, want your data out, you can export folder trees back to your disk.
Until a few years ago, giving up on my precious "os-native" file structure would have been a major headache for me. But then tools like Notion, Coda or Linear snuck into my work-life. Apps that within their database give you fantastic tools that let you structure work and thoughts and numbers, but that live as a collection of databases on edge storage around the globe.
Eagle feels a bit like Notion for local data.
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