Is there a way to add subcollectiond in Bridge?

[KevinMByers]

Hey all,

I'm currently doing mundane tasks, so my brain is in rapid fire mode right now but...I'm away from my machine so I can't play around and figured I'd ask a few questions and start a discussion.

Playing with my workflow I recently discovered "Collections" in bridge. I love it because I can sort images in separate folders the second I pull them from my camera while still keeping them in separate folders and not having to create a wildly intricate shortcut tree in Win explorer.

So..my question: is there a way to create primary collections and then subcollections?

I.e.:

Live Music

— Bands

—— Band A

—— Band B

—— Band C

—Venue

—— Venue A

—— Venue B

—— Venue C

I know you can do something like this is Lightroom, but I'm still learning in Lightroom and am not looking to moving over completely until we can batch export to PNG. (If we can with the latest update PLEASE let me know).

Also wondering if there's a way to display images that belong to multiple collections.

I.e.

All images belonging to: Live Music, Venue A, Band C, Year X

And no others.

Does that make any sense?

As usual: any and all responses are GREATLY appreciated!

Thx

K

[Stephen Marsh · Accepted solution]

If you are using keywords and other metadata, then look into Smart Collections… If you are not using metadata, then why not!?

[KevinMByers]

The answer to both of my questions is a RESOUNDING no...

But to answer your question: I'm not using Metadata tags because I kind of got thrown into the photography thing. I bought the camera for video, initially, and realized I was actually quite proficient with it...especially in the live music setting.

I ran into another problem, which I'm about to look into and that is that Bridge can't assign XMP data to CR2 files... so I'll have to look into that.

[Stephen Marsh]

Adobe does not believe in touching the original raw files… So depending on your ACR settings in Bridge, you will either be writing metadata to XMP sidecar files or into the Camera Raw database (I personally prefer sidecar files).

[KevinMByers]

I figured out that the newest update of Bridge can assign the tags to the files.

[Stephen Marsh]

I figured out that the newest update of Bridge can assign the tags to the files.

How does the new version differ?

[KevinMByers]

Not really sure, to be honest. Haven't checked out the release notes if there are any. All I really know at this point is that I wasn't able to tag my CR2 files, so I updated it, and was able to after the update.

[Stephen Marsh]

Not really sure, to be honest. Haven't checked out the release notes if there are any. All I really know at this point is that I wasn't able to tag my CR2 files, so I updated it, and was able to after the update.

Good news! Just keep in mind my post #3 – the raw files are not directly touched, either a CRDB entry is created or an XMP sidecar file is created to store the metadata and other changes made to the proprietary raw images (however DNG files can have settings written directly to them).