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jasonb254075
jasonb254075
Participant
December 8, 2023
Question

is thre such a thing as too many files in one folder?

  • December 8, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 208 views

Looking for advice.  I have certain folders with 3,500+ family photos/videos and growing. Keywords and smart collections are great for organizing, but wondering how others handle this?  Is there an advantage to keeping folders below a certain number of files?  Is it time to start a "continuation" folder?  I recall years ago Picasa would set a limit to 1000 files in a folder I believe?  (perhaps that was just for cloud storage purposes...)

 

Mind you, my question isn't pertaining to cloud storage (I'm using dropbox to keep these photos synced in the cloud--not Adobe Cloud), i'm wondering more about the performance of Bridge loading/indexing/generating previews, etc.?  Any thoughts?

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

L
Lumigraphics
Legend
December 8, 2023

It... depends. I currently am showing subfolders and have more than 90,000 images loaded in a Bridge 2022 window. But that's with a lot of cache building to make it usable.

    P
    polyxo
    Inspiring
    December 8, 2023

    I don't think there is an official statement on this matter by Adobe. While numerous other apps prove that they can be extremely fast with fetching data for massive directories, Bridge has issues with that – not only in version 14, but in all previous versions I know.

    There are good reasons to not use many folders. In theory, keywords provide access to countless content categorizations and may be used on top of collections or folders. Using metadata to retrieve content therefore – compared to one-dimensional filter approaches (folders) – is clearly the superior approach.

    In practice, however, you should create folders with up to a few hundred files where you can. That is, for as long as Adobe uses its notoriously slow mechanisms to retrieve data.

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