Moved to new PC and lost indexing

[MrDog]

Hi

I had Bridge 2019 running on a Win10 PC and many inages indexed with a lot of keywords.

Just bought a new PC (also Win 10) and installed Bridge - 2021 edition.

The first problem was that I lost all of my keywords - I researched this and copied the relevant XML file from the Appdata folder and they all appeared again.

But I seem to have no indexing set up - if I search for images with a keyword it grinds away and eventually finds them, but does not obviously cache the results. 

After a lot of searching I tried the following:

1. Went to my main Pictures folder
2. Selected View->Show items from sub folders and all my folder and images appeared in the main pane.
3. It then reported it was indexing in the status line at the bottom, and the list of keywords that I had used appeared under Filter in the Filter Panel, together with an indication of how many images there were that used each keyword.
4. If I clicked on one of those keywords it immediately showed the images that used that keyword in the Content panel.

So that all looked good. I waited until the status bar at the bottom stopped showing that it was Indexing. If I then selected a folder under Pictures the Filter panel cleared, and when I went back to Pictures it seemed to have lost all of the index.

Any clues?

[MrDog]

I now have an update on this. I have (on Windows) a folder called Pictures which contains all my images. There are sub-folders under that such as 2019, 2020 etc.

On my old PC with Bridge 2019 if I selected Pictures and then searched for a keyword (selecting all sub-folders but NOT selecting non-indexed files) it would find the expected images.

On the new PC with Bridge 2021 if I do th esame thing it finds very few images. If I then ask it search non-index files it does indeed find all the images. But then if I try again with the original settings it does not find all the images, so seems it does not update the index? If I start in a sub-folder with the search it does however find the images.

[sirhawkeye · Accepted solution]

Just as an FYI for those who might find this later... there is a way to transfer keywords and some stuff (presets) to another computer...

If your on Windows, you need to nativate to your User Profile folder and find the folder where Adobe stores this information.

Generally it's something like: C:\Users\[Profile Name]\AppData\Romaing\Adobe\)

From the Adobe folder, navigate to (or copy) the "Bridge 20##" folder (where 20## is the version of Bridge you have installed; in my case it's 2022): 

From this folder (Bridge 20##), I would keep a backup copy of the following folders:
COLLECTIONS: This contains your collections
XMP: This contains your XMP presets/templates
EXPORTPRESET (Export presets)
BATCH RENAME SETTINGS (batch file renaming presets)
WORKFLOW (your workflows if you use them)
WORKSPACES (if you've created custom workspaces)

Or you can just copy the entire "BRIDGE 20##" folder, as it's usually not very large (maybe 1GB or so)
and should contain all of your customizations to bridge.

This way you can transfer the information from your old computer to your new computer, or another computer.
There is also a way to keep a copy of this folder on a portable drive and point each of your computers to it
for a mobile workflow. This involves creating directory links to the portable drive and the
appropriate folders using window's "mklink" DOS command (I do this so I can switch between my desktop and
laptop and my keywords, collections, etc, are always there). Your "Favorites" are stored in the Windows
REgistry so you will have to re-create those again yourself, or find the registry key and copy it to the new
computer (I would just re-create or re-locate your favorites again; you only have to do it once
per install).

Then to backup, I just copy the entire "Bridge 20##" foilder to some other drive, and my settings (except the Favorites and perhaps a few other obscure things) are backed up.  But the main things (keywords, collections, presets) are backed up.

Hopefully this helps for anyone who might have changed computers or perhaps wants to know
where stuff is stored.

[sirhawkeye · Accepted solution]

Forgot to mention, to copy your keywrods from one computer to another, Go to the folder I mentioned above (\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Bridge 20##\) and copy the "Adobe Bridge Keywords.xml" and probably the "BridgeConfig_12000.xml" file as well to copy keywords.  The BridgeConfig file contains your Bridge configuration, which is probably important too.

[cutty3d]

Thank you for all this information. I was looking for a way to easily copy my Bridge collections and keywords settings to another computer. It worked!