syncing collections in Bridge among devices

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.

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.

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