Adobe Bridge - storage limits

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
March 11, 2020
3 replies
5188 views

I am curious to how much storage Adobe Bridge has? I am needing to store a lot of photos and videos on it.

Correct answer Lumigraphics

Bridge is a file browser. It just shows you what is on your hard drives.

D

double_adobe

Inspiring

Bridge is not "just a file browser." For each image file in a folder it generates up to three derivative files, depending on your settings: a preview image, a 100 percent preview image, and a thumbnail image. These are stored in a central cache folder that can take up considerable space, or can be stored "locally" (in the same folders as the images being browsed). Previous versions of Bridge limited the number of cache files to 500,000. Bridge 2021 (Version 11) limits the cache size to around 52 gigabytes. The upshot of all this is that for folders with thousands of large image files, it can take days for Bridge to generate a complete set of thumbnails and previews. To keep under the 52 GB (or 500,000-file) limit, Bridge will occasionally delete an entire folder of cache files, which can make for very slow folder browsing as well as cause a lot of disk churn and long save times in your storage array.

L

Lumigraphics

Legend

You can set the cache size to zero. Also, both Windows and Mac use caching extensively, its a part of modern system design. Without caches, everything would be slooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwww.

And, yes, it IS just a file browser. That's precisely what Bridge does. Lightroom is a database-driven image manager and guess what, it uses caching extensively- hundreds of gigabytes if you have a big library.

Finally, no, Bridge doesn't take days to generate a cache, even from a large folder. I use Bridge in production and that's just flat-out false.

P

polyxo

Inspiring

Bridge just shows the folder structure on your drives. That's done at the operating system level.

>Bridge just shows the folder structure on your drives.

Yeah, I know this – we deliberately use an option without a database and without import and export. I was answering @gary_sc who stated that having 42000 items in a folder is a terrible idea. It is – but only because Bridge can't handle it, performance-wise.

It was a lot quicker for us to have all our files we use online in just one single folder. Using some letters of the product name / serial number or metadata filters would spit out relevant results immediately, without browsing nested folders by brand and series. Bridge search gets very slow if you extend it to child folders – and showing all items of sub-folders is basically the same (and gives you the same performance-drawbacks) as if you used just one large folder.

What iMatch does looks clever to me. It keeps all assets where they are (so there is no importing to a db) but the program uses a database to wire things together and to speed up search.

Currently, I use Everything Search with Bridge (Win) when I need to locate stuff quicky. It's a shame that Adobe isn't able to build a similarly slim and fast index – and that Adobe doesn't show its search results more intelligently /attractively. Blurred thumbnails for the first 100 milliseconds, until it can render larger previews.

Just Shoot Me

Legend

Absolutely None. Bridge is a Free program that does not need the user to subscribe to any subscription plan.

It is also just a File Browser, File Manager.

It can not do any edits to any file, other than standards File Manager task, without some other program like PS, CR, ID and so on. And even then 99% of the time it only Send whatever file to one of those programs. It does Not edit them itself.

L

LumigraphicsCorrect answer

Legend

Bridge is a file browser. It just shows you what is on your hard drives.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded