Frustration with Bridge sorting...

[macstudio]

I've been a loyal Adobe user for decades and love most of their products. I am writing this to ask a simple question. Why can't a simple fix be written so that we can change the default setting for viewing and sorting in Bridge?

Years ago it was possible to set our preference and everytime It opened or reopened it remained set to our custom preference. I understand you can "manually" sort or set a "temporary" sorting preference to your liking, BUT... I have thousands of files and folders that would be too time consuming to go manual at this point, and the temporary fix doesn't even stay applied every time the window is minimized. Tech support doesn't have an answer (other than "going manual"). I'm a freelance designer and my breadth of work is just not photo image work, but depending on a particular project the sorting formula can change. At the very least I'd like to keep my preference set as long as I am working and the computer's on.

Since it changed to the current default setting of "Ascending Order, Filename" I have read many, many inquiries and/or complaints from both new and old users. This goes back years and for all the good work Adobe does with their products, this one thing really bothers me and i don't understand why Adobe doesn't act on it or attempt to give a technical or even "reasonable" answer when asked. I've seen this response forever: "Adobe is aware of it and is working on a fix" . Today, I just upgraded Bridge for the umpteenth time and the sorting issue remains. 

I'm not expecting anything to come of this just because I finally got the gumption to finally spell out my frustrations. Maybe i'll feel better about the annoyance of that aspect of my Bridge app...or find a better alternative to my file management systems. I doubt it.

[Regnad28987938vf6p]

Have you considered changing to sort order to one that you desire and then saving those changes to the workspace you are using?  If the sort order gets out of sync with your desires, a simple reset of the workspace should get you to what you desire.

[macstudio]

I appreciate your response and i will try it. I have to admit that I've never thought of doing that... didn't even realize that feature existed as I've haven't had an occasion where I had to create my own workspace—so it wasn't at my top-of mind when trying to find a workable solution. If it works (I'm assuming it will), I thank you very much for reaching out and lowering my bloodpressure! LOL. 

[BruceVI]

Custom workspaces are a foundational feature in our studio workflows. We have almost a dozen of them designed for a variety of specialized purposes depending on the stage in the production workflow at hand.  None of them are generic, and most of them are not configured in maximized, full-screen mode.  Most of them are windowed and exist alongside other point products to locate and serve assets to them easily and quickly. 

This is particularly effective in multi-monitor environments. It also makes the idea of using tear-off floating panels an unnecessarily inefficient, sloppy, and confusing practice.  Leave that to the point products that Bridge is serving at the moment. The Bridge window that stays together is clearly more efficient than having panels sprayed all over the place among other point product panels.  Furthermore, the panel dock/undock feature isn’t even available in additional windowed instances in a multi-windowed Bridge deployment. 

Many customers have never learned to move beyond a single, generic, full-screen workspace and tend to manually drag things around or open/close various panels, tweaking window and/or thumbnail sizes as necessary all day long. That’s fine if one has the time to spare.  In high volume commercial studios, that can be less than ideal when time is money. 

Far more efficient is to know what your needs are in a particular section of your workflow and design a configuration of Bridge that can be automatically selected with just a mouse click or two.  It requires a bit of discipline and foresight to learn to operate this way, but over the course of a day the time savings can be significant once the new habit is formed.

That isn’t to say that tweaks of a particular workspace are never necessary, but most who have learned the power of custom workspaces and employ them liberally in their individual workflows are rarely found manually docking, undocking and dragging panels around, or re-sizing windows, and other such time sucking habits.

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