syncing collections in Bridge among devices

[pstraus141]

I am organizing about 600 large images from the last four years. I can store them all on Dropbox. They are each in a folder organized by date -- a folder for each year, monthly folders within those, and day folders within the month folders. I don't want to move the photographs, if possible.

I have made collections by photo type/subject/etc. They work beautifully on my desktop Mac. Sometimes, I'd like to work with the collections on my laptop Mac. The collections don't exist on the the laptop.

Is there a way to synchronize the collection data? Is there any collection data in metadata? Would it be better to put keywords in metadata than to make collections if synchronization is necessary?

I found a related discussion from 2021, but I think that is about actually moving the files.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/bridge-discussions/is-it-possible-to-export-sync-bridge-collections-a...

Thanks,

Phil

[pstraus141]

I've given up on syncing collections across devices. I am putting the collection name into keywords of the metadata of each image in the collection.

This is easy for for photographs that are only in one collection. Select all of the collection, and paste the collection name into keywords.

My question is how to get the collection name into keywords without overwriting other keywords. For example, photo A is in both Abstractions and Nature collections. Suppose I put "Abstraction" into all the Abstraction photos. Is there a way to put "Nature" into the keywords of all the Nature photos without over-riding "Abstraction" in photo A?

Of course, I could do this manually for each photo that's in more than one collection, but it would be efficient and probably more accurate if I could the word "Nature" on to a group's keywords without overwriting what was there before.

I have about 20 collections with about 650 photographs. Lots of those photographs are in more than one collection.

Thanks,

Phil

[Lumigraphics]

Using Dropbox is just asking for disaster. Adobe doesn't play well with cloud services and eventually it breaks.

And Collections are machine-centric. I'd go with keywords instead. Just create whatever keywords you need. You can have as many as you want.

[polyxo]

Dropbox, in our experience works well in fully local mode. All files live on all machines, Dropbox takes care of syncing only. You can copy the collections-folder from one machine to another (on Windows in /Username/AppData/Roaming/Adobe/Bridge (version-number).

Collections will behave identical on your machines, if they look at the same files and the same folder structure – which should be the case, if you mirror all your assets with Dropbox.

Changes to collections themselves (new, deleted, removed collections) are obviously aren't synced, but you could periodically overwrite the Collections folder.

[pstraus141]

"Dropbox, in our experience works well in fully local mode. All files live on all machines, Dropbox takes care of syncing only. "  I agree; that's been my experience, too.

Do you or anyone else know where the collections-folder is on a Mac?

Thanks,

Phil

[Lumigraphics]

Application Support in the User Library folder.

[Shubham V]

Hi @pstraus141 ,

Collections folder location : /Users/xyz/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Bridge 2024

Copying the collection folder may not work exactly as your file location might be different on both systems.
If you want same collection to work on both systems with different folder structure, create a smart collection and choose "Use current folder" in lookin. This collection property will work on any folder. 

Now you can copy this collection from the above mentioned "Collections" folder location and paste it in your other systems collections folder.

Note : This is a workaround for your use case and not recommended as a preferable approach. 

Please let us know if you face any other issue. 

Thankyou,
Bridge Team

[pstraus141]

Shubham and Bridge Team,

Thanks for your good ideas. I'll try them.

Phil