You know those anxiety nightmares people get sometimes? Like... you're back in college, it's exam week, and you abruptly realize you forgot about a whole class? You meant to drop it months ago but it slipped your mind, so you never attended any lectures, did any readings, or completed any assignments? And the exam is in an hour? Your GPA is going to implode because you forgot about a class for the entire term when you were supposed to be preparing.
Bridge 2023 is that class.
My theory is that Adobe, busy as it was with the rest of it courseload software, collectively forgot all about Bridge until, like, last Tuesday. Then everybody was all "holy crap, the new Creative Suite rolls out in a week and we forgot about Bridge! Everybody get cracking, quick! Bob: write up six new features to add. Sally: add the features that Bob's writing up. Anna: get your crayons an draw a new UI. Katherine: Coffee! Brett: you're in charge of making it work with Apple Silicon. Hiram: you're German, you're efficient, you make a schedule and keep us on track! Chop chop, people!!"
I mean, it's really the only plausible explanation when you think about it. Software typically builds on earlier versions of itself, but the stuff in Bridge 2023 that's most broken is stuff that's been working fine for nearly two decades. Bob and Anna and Helmut and the others worked furiously, nonstop for... I don't know, a good four days. Heck, if God created the universe in a week, surely 96 hours is enough time to completely overhaul a foundational cornerstone of the creative suite.
I've been reading community posts with great interest, having encountered most of the problems listed as well as several fun new ones I will share. Like everyone else, I've already rolled back to Bridge 12; sure, it's slow, obtuse, frustrating, and almost stupidly limited in capability compared to some DAMs written by a single person, but it's my slow obtuse frustrating and stupidly limited in capability.
Some features of Bridge 2023's clearly abortive and ill-conceived development:
- Much of the basic interface functionality (stuff that shipped in 2005 with Bridge CS2) works differently (e.g., file dragging behavior, spacebar/Enter/Ctrl/Command behavior, etc.).
- More often, obvious quality-of-life functionality just isn't there or doesn't work. Scaling thumbnails? As many as three luxurious sizes! Previews sychronized to those thumbnails? Yes, with an obligatory 10-second delay. Greater interface customization? That does work, but somehow in working it manages to be limiting in different ways. Tell me, Adobe, why, exactly, did you see fit to remove the ability to manually resize the spacer separating metadata labels and their fields in the Metadata panel? Had that iota of convenience somehow impinged on a different capability?
- Smart Collections! don't worry, they still exist. They don't work, but they exist. The Look In: Use Current Folder option is ignored, so all your customers have a hillock of painstakingly set up Smart Collections that no longer behave as they did LITERALLY YESTERDAY.
- Workflow! Well... using Bridge 2023 is very much like "work," and my anger did flow freely. So we'll call that one a maybe. Special thanks for changing, moving, crippling, removing, and/or flat-out breaking assorted basic workflow elements for no evident reason at all.
- For example, I (used to) like assigning star ratings while running an "show unrated only" filter, so files disappear from view once they get a rating. It's a speedy and efficient workflow, because most software knows to advance to the next file whenever a previous one is filtered. Bridge 2023 does not. Bridge selects... nothing. Instead it banishes you to the start of the directoryso you can painstakingly navigate back to where you were each time.
- "Always show files in subfolders" might be more useful if it could be set on a granular basis, but once that switch is thrown for a single content tab, it's thrown for all of them. Same goes for "Show folders." I know other DAMs have toyed with the idea of basic interface customizability in the recent past -- maybe the last 45 years or so -- so it's gratifying to see Bridge maintaining its position at the cutting edge of UX in this way.
- In a similarly anachronistic vein, Bridge does not believe that I have a CUDA-capable GPU, passive-aggressively unticking the hardware acceleration checkbox and insisting that my fully compatible hardware is not compatible at all. Photoshop works fine with my GPU, but hey.
- Or maybe Bridge doesn't want to be like Photoshop any more -- I noticed the two applications are no longer on speaking terms. Did they have a fight? Attempt to invoke Photoshop from Bridge and nothing happens. Then nothing continues to happen, because Bridge does nothing when I push the Go To Photoshop button. I actually want a thing to happen, but instead of a thing there is nothing.
- Bridge is of the opinion that writing metadata tags to image files is optional, and exercises its right to forego this task about half the time. And since metadata-writing is an optional activity, it sees no reason to keep me informed of its progress or lack thereof.
- Since starting my personal Bridge 2023 Trail of Tears yesterday afternoon, the application has terminated without warning NINE TIMES. It's there, lurking on my taskbar... and then it's gone. It returns obediently enough when I summon it, but slinks away again when my attention is elsewhere.
- The rather hideous new side panels don't seem to work the way they're supposed to, unless refusing to hide when told to hide and refusing to maximize when told to maximize was an intentional design choice, like the decision to shoot that one episode of House of the Dragon in near-total darkness so no one could see what was happening.
- As a corrolary, it might not have been the worst idea to mention that the accent key is, for reasons inexplicable, the new maximize button.
- Bridge has crashed with an unknown error. This error requires you to repair Adobe Creative Cloud. Please click here to download the repair tool.
- Adobe Creative Cloud Repair Tool has completed successfully. Please restart Creative Cloud.
- Bridge has crashed with an unknown error. This error requires you to repair Adobe Creative Cloud. Please click here to download the repair tool.
- Adobe Creative Cloud Repair Tool has completed successfully. Please restart Creative Cloud.
- Bridge has crashed with an unknown error. This error requires you to repair Adobe Creative Cloud. Please click here to download the repair tool.
- And so on.
This vast post doesn't even cover half of the oddities, glitches, foibles, bugs, features, and breakdowns I've encountered in Bridge 2023. Judging from the support forums, it seems like I'm not alone.
Adobe, if you're listening: if you really did forget about Bridge until last week, you should have just told us. We'd have understood -- it's a busy time, and besides, who hasn't, at some point in their life, forgotten about a class or a report or a product or a child? We are all but fallible creatures.
Here's my advice in case this happens again: next time, instead of releasing the Cyberpunk 2077 of productivity software with your otherwise solidly-engineered tools, why not use that Adobe Money to buy thirty million Imatch licenses and just bundle that with Creative Suite instead? That program has its idiosyncrasies, sure, but it works as advertised. Think how much easier it would be than trying to catch up technologically with... uh... a DAM made by a single person working out of his home.
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