Don’t waste your time with 14.1.0 Bridge Beta unless…

[BruceVI]

…you can afford the time to put up with the following:

14.1 Does not properly migrate your custom workspaces.  You will have to rebuild and re-organize all of them.  Custom workspaces are corrupted on import and shoved to the back of the line behind the default Adobe template workspaces.  Rebuilding corrupted custom workspaces takes up valuable time that could be better spent on other things. This has been standard behavior at every build along the way ever since Br 13 was introduced in pre-release in the spring of 2022, six months before the first public beta was introduced.

14.1 does not import keyboard shortcuts from the previous Br 14 version.  You will have to rebuild all of these as well.

If your Bridge cache is located anywhere other than Adobe’s default location, you’ll have to re-direct it in preferences or suffer the performance hit as Br builds a new cache at the default location.

For many years, Br has never migrated the preference for thumbnail size.  It always defaults to 1000.  If you commonly work with larger files you’ll have to reset this option.  One would think that a re-build of the application two years ago would have addressed this missed preference migration.

In our studio situation these re-sets absorb almost an hour of wasted time on a single machine before proper testing can even begin, and that’s only because we’ve been down this road too many times before and have developed some short cuts in the process.

Adobe should have more respect for its customers than continually treating us like disposable, free, crash-test dummies.  The best, brightest, and most experienced customer volunteers are getting fed up with this. 

[gary_sc]

Hey VI, 

I can only think you've messed around with your computer's settings to such a point that that might be the cause of your issues. In EVERY one of your comments above, I've not seen ANY of them in this and in previous releases except the rebuilding of personal workspaces, which was a build from over a year and a half ago. Since then, my workspaces have shown up as intended. And, oh yeah, I've never even seen that screenshot you show above, on my computer, that's just done without any intercept on my part.

I seriously suggest you reset your computer to its original settings, reset everything, and see if that solves your problems.

[Lumigraphics]

FOR EVERY ADOBE UPDATE... HONOR THE DAMNED UI SETTINGS!

I despise dark mode and upgrades always ignore the setting so i get dark mode every #&$!* time and my eyes explode until i can get to Prefs and fix it.

[gary_sc]

Wait, VI, Lumigraphics, wait.

I think I just figured it out. 

You're having so many issues transitioning to the various Bridge updates because you're trying to update from Version 12. The steps from 12 to 14 are big, and many things have changed within the application. 

Here's an idea: Make all of your changes and adaptions from 12 to "a" current version. Then, go back to your version 12. As future versions come out, take that "current" version and update it to the next version. I'm speculating that with that version, you will not be having the instillation horrors you both are experiencing. Hopefully, at some point, the most recent version will be tolerable for you. But in the meantime, you will not be building a deep frustration from having to redo all of your settings and preferences, which leads to anything being enough to want to kill the whole release. 

It's telling that I'm not having any of the issues that you two are. You both are keeping with 12, and I long ago left it. With each update, you both have to do lots of work to set it to your liking; I've not done that in ages. The only common thread here is that you both return to 12 — I do not.

It's worth a try, guys.

[Lumigraphics]

I have done a lot of testing and for me, its all about my production workflow. Right now, v12 gets the job done with hiccups. v13 is unusable, v14 still has too many bugs and broken behavior. I've tried doing as new clean install and setup from scratch which I'm pretty good at. No joy. The app itself is just too much of a mess and any new features like tabs (do not want), keyboard shortcuts (I mostly use the mouse), zip creation (yawn) aren't much use.

[gary_sc]

@Lumigraphics you may be missing my point.

Download 14, set it up, but since you don't like it, don't use it. But do not toss it. Just use 12. Leave it there until the next update becomes available, and let the next 14 update from the last 14. I'm speculating that it will have all of your workspaces, background choices, etc. 

Do I KNOW this will work? Of course not, but I think it might. I say this because, with each update, I do NOT have to reset the Workspaces, the background, etc. I just continue. 

At the most, I'm trying to solve at least one of your headaches. 

I, for one, pretty much enjoy working with 14. The only thing I find really bad is how it transfers large numbers of files from one folder to another, ESPECIALLY to the trash.

[Lumigraphics]

I don't use custom workspaces, so that isn't a problem. I'm not having setup issues other than the UI which is just annoying.

My problem is actually using the app. Its a mess. I updated a bunch of scripts for v13 and v14 broke several of them and I just didn't have it in me to try and fix them again.

When I was a kid, I was a huge baseball fan. I'd listen to Tigers games on the radio with my dad, I knew all the players, etc. Then they had the steroid scandals, labor problems, etc. The year when the World Series was cancelled was the last straw for me, they lost me forever as a fan. Now I don't watch or attend games and don't follow the standings.

That's how I'm feeling about Bridge, if that makes sense.

[gary_sc]

I "think" I follow your baseball analogy. 

Even though you do not have custom Workspaces, you did complain about the Interface setting not transferring over, so for you, I was responding to that. 

You do have your custom scripts, and I can see how breaking them repeatedly with each release would be an exasperating pain. Since I have no custom scripts, I have no experience with their breaking. Just out of curiosity, do scripts break more often with Bridge than with other applications you've created scripts for?

[FWIW, almost 40 years ago I took a class in Basic, mainly to see what scripting was like. I got an A in the class but also convinced myself that I'll let bright folks like you do the scripting; I'll just use the results! :>)]

[Lumigraphics]

The baseball anology is that they lost a loyal fan by incompetence. It wasn't worth investing my time or emotion anymore.

I didn't have too much trouble (beyond the lousy tools and documentation) with scripting before v13. I started writing scripts for my use and that's mostly what I maintain. Extensibility has arguably been the best feature of Bridge. At work I do less "creative retouching" and more "image processing." Scripting make my life much, much easier and if it breaks then that's a huge problem.

[gary_sc]

Re: baseball. OK, I get it now

Re: my question, "Do scripts break more often with Bridge than with other applications you've created scripts for?"

[Lumigraphics]

My scripts were fine until Bridge 13, they mostly worked on older and current versions. I haven't had this kind of problem with Photoshop or Excel, the only other two apps that I've done much scripting for.

[BruceVI]

@ Gary

My observations are based on a very high level of testing discipline and repeatability. The results are identical on both an aging 4 year old work station running Windows 10 and a brand new Windows 11 laptop.

If you read the title of the thread, my comments are not about in-version updates, but rather the independent beta build that was just placed in front of us.  The screen cap I posted above appears at the first launch of every Bridge beta/pre-release test build I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen close to 100 of them over the past 15 years.  I have no experience with apple products, so either the experience is different in that environment, or your testing methods don’t recognize the need to clean up the mess that Adobe leaves behind with every Bridge uninstall.  Those leftovers allow new beta installs to be informed by past behavior of earlier test (release?) builds. That allows the beta install to behave like an update, not a clean install (version upgrade?). 

Contamination like that introduces variables into the testing process that don’t yield particularly valuable, repeatable results that accurately reflect the upgrade experience of the vast majority of Bridge users who have never heard of the beta or pre-release testing programs.  I clean up Adobe’s droppings after every uninstall of Bridge to keep infections moving forward to a minimum and my reporting to be as accurate and repeatable as possible.

And yes, I do have both Br 12 and the latest version of Br 14 on my test beds.  I have also been forced to re-work all my former Br 12 custom workspaces.  I’ve also had to invent a couple new ones to compensate for Adobe’s obnoxious, time-wasting design choice to remove the double-click, independent, automatic furl/unfurl ability of the left and right panel docking ports to their designed widths. We have been left with an inefficient, manual dragging behavior that I had to get creative to overcome. In one particular workflow I have been forced to change back and forth between two newly created workspaces where only one was needed in the past.

• Do things once efficiently.
• Do things automatically whenever possible. 

So why aren’t the beta builds informed by the newly re-designed workspaces in the Br 14 build?   In fact, they are, but only to some extent.  The migrated workspaces ignore the gridlock feature, and don’t know which monitor they are designed to live on. They don’t learn what size a windowed workspace is supposed to be, whether or not the workspace is windowed or maximized, and they are ALWAYS shoved to the back of the line up in the toolbar behind the Adobe’s generic stock workspaces, and everything has to be re-ordered and re-designed every time a new beta build is tested. About the only thing migrated properly from their original definitions in Br 14 are the components they are designed to contain.

If history repeats itself, the next full version upgrade will sport these issues unless Adobe can figure it out before that time.

Let’s also not forget the fact that customers using newly designed compact, windowed workspaces that don’t include the bloated 13/14 era path bar, (in order to gain back a bit of vertical screen real estate), should never use the command: View>Show Items from subfolders.  It will crash Bridge every time and has done so for at least the last 3 public updates.

[Tyrehl347730515uwr]

What mess are you talking abou, Brucet?  I don't see anything left after I uninstall Bridge. 

Thank you!

[BruceVI]

@ Tyrehl

If you are on Windows I can assist you.  Someone else might be able to guide you if you’re on a Mac.

After you’ve uninstalled the Br beta build and selected the option to remove all settings, you’ll have to navigate (on a PC) the following path.

C:>Users>(user name)>AppData>Roaming>Adobe

AppData is a hidden system folder that you will need to make visible first. 

• Do a search for “File Explorer Options”. 
• In the dialog box, select the “View” tab.
• In the Files and Folders section activate the radio button “Show hidden files, folders, and drives.

Once you arrive at the Adobe folder at the end of the path above, look for a folder named Bridge (beta) and delete it.

Now you have a clean uninstall without the orphaned files that Adobe leaves behind.

It’s sadly ironic that the Br install/uninstall is bookended by the following dialog boxes, neither of which does what they say they will.  How are customers supposed to trust Adobe to make serious changes to the underlying code when they can’t even perform these two things correctly?

[BruceVI]

OOPS

[Tyrehl347730515uwr]

Can someone reveal where these orphaned files can be found on a Mac?

[BruceVI]

It took a while for me to find time to re-test and post a follow up on my observations that started this topic. The deeper dive was triggered by paying closer attention to one of Gary’s observations.  I’ll provide some context from Br 13/14 history that began back in May of 2022 three months prior to the very first public beta release of Bridge.

For those that don’t know me, you can find a bit of me here:  https://tinyurl.com/mr8jfb4s

After only six months of preliminary testing back in 2022, and against strong objections from a lot of asset management professionals that knew and warned Adobe what was about to happen, Adobe launched the first public release of Br 13 in the early winter of 2022. They had stripped the traditional and highly valued multi-window feature and in exchange offered a bug infested, performance crippled architecture that was, quite simply, broken.  

I needed to keep my studio staff using a  Ferrari and found that I couldn’t efficiently run a studio with the remanufactured Yugo that Adobe tried to pretend was the future.  I chose to remain with the vastly superior design of Br 12.

• Do things once, efficiently.
• Do things automatically whenever possible.

To this day, out of respect and loyalty, I continue to install and thoroughly inspect every test and release/update version of Bridge.  Until early this year, it usually took less than 15 minutes of exploring each new test build to realize that The  Emperor still wasn’t wearing any clothes. I would uninstall each unprofessional build, clean up Adobe’s sloppy leftovers, and continue using Br 12 in all our professional environments.  

Adobe management has been repeatedly informed about Bridge’s defective workspace migration, (along with the vast number of bugs and workflow destruction that came along with it), starting back in the early summer of 2022. During all this time and after multiple inquiries, Adobe has responded only once in August of 2022 before the first public Br 13 release when Subbi Pillai stated:

“Since the underlying UI framework has changed now, migrating the workspaces created in the older version (released version) of Bridge [ Bridge 12] to the newer version [Br 13] is very tricky. The team is working on this as a top priority.”

Since the defect still remains today, obviously they have not.  Perhaps they thought if they ignored the problem, it would go away.

Since late winter of this year, I test Bridge installs on both a new Windows 11 laptop and a four year old Windows 10 workstation. Both test machines are now identically installed with both Br 12.0.4.266 and Br 14.0.4.222. Each version has an independent cache location.

I won’t bore you with the testing details. If you’ve explored the link at the beginning of this message you’ll know that I’m an expert at this sort of Bridge testing. I have discovered that Bridge beta and pre-release builds all display the following dialog box when first launched after a clean install.

It was a pain in the ass to test for it, but I have discovered that regardless of which option one chooses in the above dialog box, Bridge test builds ALWAYS attempt to migrate workspace definitions from an installed Br 12 version, while ignoring all the contemporary application settings, (including custom KBSC settings), found in the installed versions of Br 14.  Apparently, since the summer of 2022 the test builds have always behaved that way.

Since by their own admission Br 12 workspace migration to the new Bridge version is problematic, why does Adobe keep dishing out the same lazy effort and force their customers to repeatedly waste valuable time repairing this sort of incomplete and disrespectful behavior before choosing to move on to proper testing?  How many more times will we have to rebuild our workspaces and KBSCs just to properly test potential advancements within existing professional workflows? 

More importantly, if the current stand-alone test builds are any indication of what is to come, what happens at the next full version Bridge upgrade?

I lay responsibility for this time-wasting nonsense directly on the shoulders of the two Bridge product managers Subbi Pillai and Ajay Shukla.  Subbi has been around since Br 12 so he should know better.  On the other hand, Ajay’s CV  almost exclusively describes himself as an expert developer of animation applications since joining Adobe back in 2007.  It is beyond my comprehension how an animation expert became a product manager of an asset management tool without any obvious experience in professional asset management in high volume production studio environments.

Adobe Bridge is both elegant and unique in the asset management application world. It has no significant competition. Ignorant design ideas at the start of the Br 13/14 era have mangled or destroyed decades old reliable asset management workflows. Isn’t it time that Bridge receives not only the development respect such a unique tool deserves, but also the marketing resources necessary to get folks to know just how valuable Bridge can be?

If I believed that they are listening, I’d ask Adobe how any accomplished digital craftsman could respect a digital tool manufacturer that is so insecure that it now streets over 20 versions of Photoshop, more than a dozen versions of Bridge, and a handful of versions of Lightroom classic?  These are just the variations of applications contained within a “Photography Subscription” package.

It appears that Adobe has gotten so afraid of their own indecision that they are now creating a “feature” inside Bridge that allows one to pick a Photoshop version from among the vast array of CC Ps “version noise” that currently exists.  Keep in mind that Adobe has chosen to exclude in the CC desktop app, a version of Ps 2022 that fully interfaces with Br 12, currently the most efficient version of Bridge ever created.

I’ve suspected since the beginning of the CC, subscription era, that Adobe is intentionally cultivating a type of “drug cartel business corporate culture” by design, rather than by accident.  The current watered-down state of Bridge is just one example.

If this pisses you off, join the club.  We’ve got jackets.