Any suggested Bridge substitutes for Apple Silicon Macs?

[lc55472355]

From reading messages posted on this forum by owners of M1 Macs, I gather that Bridge is currently unuseable for searching by keywords.  I've used Bridge as my image assets manager on Windows PCs for six years and have a lot of study and hard work invested in learning Bridge's features and adding keywords and other metadata to my images.  Needless to say I am disappointed to learn that, although Photoshop will now work fairly well on my new Mac mini M1, Bridge will not, and Adobe has not set an ETA for an ARM-compatible version.

In the meantime, I would really like to find a way to search my image library by keyword. I thought perhaps I could use Lightroom Classic to perform simple searches, but posts on Adobe's Lightroom Forum make it sound like the effort to get Lightroom up and working would be considerable. I have looked online at about 10 digital asset management programs.  The only ones that seem to fit the bill without breaking the bank are ACDsee Photo Studio for Mac 8 (one-time purchase $79.95) and Picktorial ($5 per month).  Can anyone comment on these or suggest another?   

[gary_sc]

Yeah, I can give you a suggestion: HoudahSpot. 

It's a general search application for the Mac, but saying it's general is like saying the SuperBowl is just another football game. 

HoudahSpot can search every drive connected to your computer, but you can limit any searches down to a specific folder. You can do full Boolien searches, and you can search in specific fields (like Keywords). It's one of my top three "Must Have" extra applications on my Mac. I cannot imagine not having these.

[lc55472355]

Thank you, Gary, for this suggestion!  

I took a look at HoudahSpot.  No mention of compatibility with Apple silicon processors, however a tech's post in their forum regarding another of their apps says they are having to weigh developing an app to run natively on Apple silicon, which would be incompatible with older versions of macOS, or to stick to depending on Rosetta.  Apparently their Geo- app runs well with Rosetta.

What are the other two applications you recommend so highly, if you don't mind sharing.  🙂

[gary_sc]

Hi IC,

My other two "MUST HAVE" apps include "Default Folder" and "ChronoSync."

Default Folder provides immediate access to any folder you've used in the past 10 (the actual # is a pref) uses. So, for example, if you are going back and forth from multiple folders, when in the Save window or Open window, you can easily and quickly chose which folder you want to go to. Plus, you can have "Favorites," so if you are constantly going to one folder every month or so, make it a Favorite. Plus, if you're like me and have many windows and folder open, if you are in a Save or Open window and just drag your mouse around the screen and move over the folder you're looking for, you can click on application windows and open a folder. There are many other features.

Chronosync is a copy/backup application that does Zero-Sum calculations so you always know you're getting everything you intended to copy/backup. It's range of capabilities is extraordinary and impossible to do it justice in a short paragraph. But, as an example, if you back up your images onto a 2nd hard drive, it will compare what's on drive one with drive two and know which ones have been updated or new and only move them over. Plus, you can set it to back up OR mirror so if you delete a file on drive one, it will either (your choice) delete it from drive two or put it into an archive folder so you can access files you've deleted on drive one.

While I'm at this, a bonus: I have all of my images on one external drive. I have a 2nd external drive that I back up from drive one (in case it fails (and I have had that happen)). I also use BackBlaze, to back everything up to the clouds. A backup drive doesn't mean much if the house has burned down. BackBlaze is not expensive and provide multiple ways to get your data back depending on how much you need back. For a few files you can just download them from the site. For more files, they will send you a 128 GB Flash Drive. Keep it and get a very reasonable charge for the drive or return the drive. If you want more back, they will send you an 8 TB drive. Again, keep it for a nominal charge or send it back. If you chose to use them, mention me and we both get an extra month free.

Oh wait, one more bonus app: Overflow! I have MANY applications, some I use all the time and they are in my Dock. There are others I use often that I really do not need in my Dock. There are others I use so seldom that I can't remember I have them and certainly do not need them in my Dock but need to easily find them when I do need them. Overflow is a single icon in your Dock that can hold both documents AND applications as icons. One click on an application or document opens that item. Applications are placed (by you) in tabs and there are as many tabs as you need. I, for example, have one for Maintenance, one for Drawing, one for Adobe applications, one for Web things, etc. within each tab are all of the applications I have for that category and you can have one application's icon in as many tabs as you want. You can expand any tab to hold as many applications as you need. (One tab cannot have fewer spaces than another tab.) I have about 24 icons in my Dock out of hundreds of applications, and all are easy to find.

Sales pitch is over. Enjoy!

[lc55472355]

After posting my original message, I looked further into the Finder app’s search function on my M1 Mac and discovered that it will do searches by metadata field.  I will give instructions for how to do this below, and conclude with a message I received from Picktorial regarding their app running on M1’s.

Keyword searches in Mac Finder run very quickly, faster than they ever did in Bridge!  If you have a backup of your Bridge keywords, in the form of a text file that you can open and refer to rather than trying to recall all your keywords, you can easily search for those keywords in Finder.  I am a home user of Photoshop and Bridge and just this year switched from Windows PC to Mac, so I will give step-by-step instructions for how to do this for others like myself:

First, I chose to configure Finder so that searches are limited to the files in the open folder:  With Finder the active window, in the “main menu” at the top of the screen select Finder > Preferences > Advanced > When performing a search:  Search the Current Folder

In the Finder window, double click on the parent folder that contains the images to which you assigned keywords for Bridge.

Ignore the standard search field in the upper right corner of the Finder window.  Instead, bring up the Finder advanced search fields:  Command + F

Two new fields will appear beneath the words Search:  This Mac “Your Folder Name”. 

In the first field, click on the arrows to open the drop-down menu and click Other…

In the Select a search attribute pop-up window, scroll down to Keywords and check its box.

If you want to add an additional keyword, to narrow your search, choose it now.  When you’re done, click OK.

In the second search field, choose matches or contains.

In the third search field, type one of the keywords from your Bridge keyword list.

Hit the Return key to run the search.

If you don't see the hits as icons (pictures), at the top of the window open the View icon and select as icons.  To make the icons larger or smaller, use the slide in the lower right corner of the window.

To import an image to Photoshop, drag and drop it from the Finder window into the document window in Photoshop.

If you don’t get any hits, experiment with switching contains for matches, dropping the “s” at the end of the word, etc.  

There is no mention on Picktorial’s website of whether it is compatible with the new Apple silicon processor Macs.  I sent them an email and received the following message from their tech support team:

“Yes, Picktorial is compatible with M1 Macs.  We are also working on the native version for M1, however there is no ETA at the moment.”

[PECourtejoie]

Hello, if you still want to use the tight integration of Bridge with the rest of the Adobe Ecosystem natively on Apple Silicon (M1...) processors, you should try the latest Beta build: https://community.adobe.com/t5/bridge-discussions/an-update-for-the-adobe-bridge-beta-is-now-availab...

[PECourtejoie]

Or use Bridge 13, but be aware that it gained multiple content panels, a new interface, at the expense of the multiple windows ability. So keep an old version handy if you need that feature now. The Bridge team has heard loud and clear the fact that users need that feature.