Searching NAS drives in Bridge

[nicke93376392]

We recently purchased a Synology RS815+ NAS for use by our Creative team running Mac OS X.  We set up indexing on the NAS and the OS X clients are able to search for and find files on the NAS with no problems.

With Bridge, however, it's a different story.  Bridge doesn't bring up any search results unless you first use Bridge to go into the directory containing the file you are searching for.  If you reboot the Mac it resets everything so that it again brings up no search results, even for files it found before the reboot, until you again manually browse the parent folder in Bridge. 

Does anybody know how to successfully search a NAS drive using Bridge?

Many thanks,

Nick

[Abambo]

My experience is that searching in Bridge is much slower then searching in the OS. But searching with Bridge works. So I use Bridge only when looking for exif entries and likes. I'm using Windows and Windows servers, but the principal should be the same.

[nicke93376392]

Thanks for the reply.  They are able to search for the files using OS X Finder but our Creative team need to use Bridge for their searching.  I'm not exactly sure about the reasons why as I don't use Adobe CC myself but I know that it saves them lots of time if they are able to.

I think it's going to be a Bridge / Apple Mac specific problem to do with the way that Bridge caches search results when the files live on a network drive.

[Abambo]

The problem with Bridge is, that it uses its own index as there are rather useful additional information stored on an image file, information that the OS is not aware of. I never investigated into a multi user search procedure, so I can't help with that.

May be you find more information here: How to view & manage files in Adobe Bridge

Jump to the search section.

[nicke93376392]

Hi Abambo, thanks for the link.  On Step 7 it says:

"(Optional) Select Include Non-Indexed Files to specify that Adobe Bridge search uncached and cached files. Searching uncached files (in folders that you have not previously browsed in Adobe Bridge) is slower than searching cached files."

This is exactly what we are seeing.  If we browse the folder in Bridge then we get search results in that folder but if we haven't previously browsed the folder in Bridge then we get no results.  On top of this, when the Mac is rebooted then the cache is reset.

I've just tried to do an uncached search from the top level folder and Bridge says that it is currently indexing the whole folder.  This is taking some time as it is 2TB in size but I'm hoping that this is the answer and Bridge will maintain it's own local index that will survive reboots.

[coldjtf · Accepted solution]

Click the eyeglass icon in the search bar on Bridge and in the drop down menu select 'Spotlight search'.

It will then use the spotlight database and not use Bridge search.

One question - could you outline your setup?

I currently have a RAID in a MacPro Tower and the Mac's Bridge search that over the network and this works fine, however I want to move to a modern Synology NAS.

But how did you get spotlight to work reliably on the NAS? I've heard that no NAS actually supports spotlight natively and a load of unreliable terminal hacks are required to get spotlight to index a remote volume.

[bluebrad]

i talked to a tech and they say they're not supporting NAS (WTF) all my clients and other partner business all run on NAS setups

[Andrea267606568kys]

Hi everyone! It happened the same to me and it drove me nuts. How it was solved: in Bridge, on the stubborn NAS folder, right click>show in Bridge. Voilà! Unlocked. 

I did it in Windows but I guess it works on Mac too. 

[bluebrad]

its not that it will not show the folder its that it is slow or will not show the nas at all. a system reboot will most of the time fix it but if bridge has a hickup it looses question.