Bridge previews / thumbnails, generation and keeping them forever .. how?

[groucho90]

I have Bridge 2024.  I have several questions about thumbnails and previews.  The Adobe documentation I have found is vague.  Questions:  1) What specifically is the difference between a thumbnail and a preview?  2) When and where are they used, and how?  3)  When are they generated, and where are they stored?  4) Is there a way to tell Bridge to keep thumbnails FOREVER [I don't care about disk space.]  My problem is going to a folder with many -large- images, having generated the thumbnails at one time in the past, and finding myself sitting for a -long- time while Bridge slowly regenerates and displays the thumbnails.  This makes revisiting older image folders very tedious. 

[D Fosse]

Thumbnails are thumbnails, the preview is the bigger image you get in the Preview panel (if you have that up). This is all stored in the user account on your system drive (users > app data > roaming > Adobe > Bridge > cache), but you can direct the Bridge cache wherever you want in preferences. It can grow to considerable sizes - mine is usually in the 20-40 GB range whenever I check.

Yes, I agree that Bridge is too slow nowadays, and I've said so on several occasions here. Your description fits my experience exactly. Whenever I open a folder that hasn't been open for a week or two, it's coffee break, as thumbnails slowly appear one by one. It can take five minutes to load a folder.

There's a lot of settings in Bridge preferences, I've tried them all to eliminate any bottlenecks, nothing seems to help. Cache size is set to 50 GB.

I do have a particularly big archive - but I also use dedicated DAM software that manages the same archive with instant thumbnails and previews. That's what I use now if I'm looking for something. Lightroom Classic is also considerably faster.

[Chuck Uebele]

Moved to the Bridge forum, from the Photoshop forum.

[gary_sc]

Hi, @groucho90, let me take a stab at explaining what you can do and what you cannot. 

As mentioned by @D Fosse, the number of images in your folders makes a big difference in how much coffee you can drink before getting to work. Some here have folders with thousands of images and complain a lot about the speed of Bridge. I seldom have more than a hundred within any given folder, and I see nothing to complain about. 

The biggest slowdown in Bridge is that it tries to provide an accurate image to you, not by displaying the embedded JPG image in any given file, but by applying any adjustments from the sidecar file and color corrections. Thus, any Preview you may observe will be more accurate than what one might see from an image viewer that relies upon the JPG. However, for many folks, the JPG is more than sufficient for their needs.

If that would be your preference, you can speed things up with any embedded view by selecting the approprite optins in the "Options for Preview Quality & Thumbnail Generation" shown below.

Otherwise, these are controlled by the Cache, which can be set in the Settings/Preferences under Cache.

I believe it's the size of the hard drive or the amount of free space available. On my computer, I can set it from 5 – 740 GB. Since I have a 1 TB drive, I only have about 350-ish GB free. For my purposes, 75 works well. 

As far as the other settings, I do like any Previews I've made to be ready to go when I need them, and I let Bridge Compact the Cache (to keep it within my 75 GB max), but I also let it Purge any Cache older than a month. If I'm going into old image folders, I just accept that it will take a bit of time before its running fast. You can uncheck that if desired.

One other area to examine is Cache Management, here are the options:

 

Compact Cache Now: this is a pre-maintenance option. If you're running a bit out of space, you can compact the Cache NOW instead of purging the cache.

Purge 100% Previews in Cache: This, again, is a space saver.

Purge all local cache files: a "more brutal" approach to the option below.

There are times when Bridge starts acting stupid. I mean, it's really stupid. I've seen people complaining in these forums that ratings and labels are not sticking, renaming is not possible, and other operations cannot continue. However, once the cache for a given folder is purged, all works wonderfully. This can be done either by the ALL local cache purge or selected purges as can be done as shown below from the Tools menu:

My areas of expertise do not include knowing how or why the caches go kapow, but it does happen. The best way to get things back on track is to purge the cache for any folder with issues. Purging ALL caches also removes the "X" number of GB of stuff sitting on your computer.

Let me add at the end one gripe of mine with my simple solution: the bizarre arrangement of the various Panels in the "Essential" Workspace. After selecting a thumbnail, the last thing I expect to see is a small Preview. If I want to see the thumbnail's image, I want to see the image, not a larger thumbnail. So, I moved the Panels around; the results can be seen below; something for you to mull over if necessary.

 I hope all this muttering gives you some thoughts to work with. Good luck!