Desktop and Ext Hard Drives' folders don't show in the left side bar/window. It just stopped.

[rjwpix]

Bridge can be a pain! All of a sudden I'm no longer getting a hierarchical display of folders in the left hand window from either the desktop or any of my external hard drives. I don't know how I lost that ability. This happens to me often in Bridge...sometimes I mistakenly or inadvertently hit a key and poof! my entire workspace and flow is screwed up and it takes me over an hour to figure it out. I really hate when this happens.

So....how do I get the display of folders back in the left window? Many thanks...

[Lumigraphics]

Are you looking at the Folder panel? That's where the folder tree is shown.

[PECourtejoie]

Hi, you can try to see if you minimized the left side panels, by hovering the left side edge of the interface, then click and dragging towards the right.

You can also right-click on the workspace name, and select "reset"

There is also the option of going to the Windows menu, and selecting "Folders Panel"

[Conrad C]

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@rjwpix wrote:

This happens to me often in Bridge...sometimes I mistakenly or inadvertently hit a key and poof! my entire workspace and flow is screwed up and it takes me over an hour to figure it out. I really hate when this happens.

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The most common cause of that is accidentally pressing a shortcut that shows and hides the panels. Knowing about them might prevent that in the future. For example:

If you press the Tab key, all panels will hide. The Tab key is a popular shortcut for hiding panels in many Adobe applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom Classic...) so that you can see the content without distraction. If all panels unexpectedly disappear, it might be because the Tab key was pressed by mistake, so try pressing the Tab key to see if they all come back.

If you double-click the line that divides the left panel stack from the others, it will hide the left panel stack. So another possibility is that dividing line was double-clicked by mistake. If that happens, click the Window menu because all of the panels are listed there…any panel that is accidentally hidden can be shown again using the Window menu.