They look really really bad. This has been a thing for at least 2 years now, one day bridge updated and it just started using really low resolution thumbnails and you cannot tell what it even in them most of the time.
If you look in the %appdata%/adobe/bridge/cache folder you can find 256 and 1024 thumbs, but it only uses the 256 thumbs and there is no way to force it to use the higher quality thumbnails it caches. I don't know if this is just an issue no one noticed at adobe or if it's an issue they aren't seeing on their own dev versions, but I've confirmed it with multiple other people at this point, including adobe.
Sometimes if you scroll fast enough in bridge for it to not generate a thumbnail, it will use the embedded thumb for the file, or a preview version or something - and this embedded/preview of the file is far higher quality and loads quicker than any of the generated thumbnails. However, once you click on the file it generates a super low resolution preview and won't show a high quality preview again until you clear cache.
I've talked to adobe reps in a phone call about this and they confirmed they were seeing the same issue. That was at least 4 versions of bridge ago and I'm really wondering how such an important part of bridge - previewing files through thumbnails - the most important part of bridge, the reason it exists, doesn't prioritize fixing visual quality bugs.
It is the only thing preventing me from actually using bridge at this point, I loved this program when I could see what I was selecting before I clicked on it and saw it in the preview window, I have to use xnview mp right now which doesn't allow me to open files with enter or open multiple files at once and that's still less annoying than my thumbnails being unreadable garbage.
I've had people install bridge that don't even use adobe products just to test and see if they also see the bad quality thumbnails, and they do, the thumbnails are low quality for them too and none of the settings or toggles or drop down menus or any thing other than adjusting the slider to make thumbnails bigger seems to effect whether you can see them or not. They look clearer before thumbnails are generated, let me select higher quality thumbnails if this was intended, I do not like the 256 pixel thumbnails you are generating and displaying now.
I've been subscribing to adobe to use photoshop and bridge for years now and it's insane to me that this worked great and now it's just completely broken, does anyone at adobe even use bridge, how could you not have seen this thumbnail issue?
I hate to sound indignant, but I am, I really really would prefer to be using bridge, but I can't.
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