Will 2024 be the year Bridge starts to work?

Report · Dec 31, 2023

Hello World

By now we all know the Adobe really messed up Bridge after 12 and STILL tries to build upon a broken foundation. Why this is we can only speculate about. What is your theory? I have a few.

1. The team got a new lead that, as they all do, wanted to show their qualities, and decided to implement a lot of horrible code.

2. An insane amount of time preassure. Why? My wild guess, all the troups must focus on AI and ignore the pro corwd who doesnt need the AI in this amount.

3. Simply new coders who dont know what they do.

4. New directives from outside of Bridge team asking for bad changes that isnt doable.

5. Bridge have had a bad code for a long time and every feature added just messes it all up even more and the patching is'nt doable any more.

6. Bridge has been left out in the cold by Adobe, soon to be deleted, and no good coder is left to give it real love. Just meaningless new bad coded features.

7. I dont know, all this is really a mystery. You tell me guys?

So, food for thought! What is the reason for the crash of Bridge and why dont they communicate about what have gone wrong. Why dont they start over. Tell me!

Or even better, Adobe, please, respond regarding the broken state of Bridge.

Happy new Year everyone. Even you Adobe and Bridge Team. My new years promise is to spam this forum everyday with new posts untill Adobe answers whats going on and what they are going to do about it.

How about you? 🙂

With love, as always
// Magnus

Report · Dec 31, 2023

Hi, @MazStudios; perhaps a better question would be why Bridge is working absolutely fine on some computers while others have some or all of the issues you point out.

Would I state that Bridge is absolutely perfect? Of course not. There is no application on earth, that is.

But I, for one (and others as well), have been asking for multiple Content Tabs since Bridge was released. I use them and enjoy them all the time. I would hate it if they were removed, as it would be like Photoshop with all of the Layer features removed.

I find that the functioning speed is excellent. There are some who want Bridge to rip through a folder of 2000 images in a moment, far faster than any user (outside of Data, perhaps) could possibly find useful). Admittedly, there are those who want to buy a car for street use that can go 200 mph; why?

I will agree that the look of the UI leaves a lot to be desired — Bridge does look like what they'd have just before they made it look good and fixed all of the functioning UI and layout issues.

For me, Bridge is not broken. I use it daily and I appreciate what it can do. What I would LOVE to know is why is it not working for others as it is for me.

Report · Dec 31, 2023

Search for my other posts about this. The ones where I included examples from 12 Vs 13-14. It's a huge loss in speed.

i have no idea about the references you make about cars. It's not relevant. As is the comment that you don't experience the loss in quality. Just because YOU don't have any problems doesn't mean any one else doesn't either. That's a really ignorant way at looking at problems. "I've never been robbed, so that means no one else has that problem".

As to why some have problems and some not. That's easy. Bad code that makes it unstable on the thousands of different configs PC has.

and beyond that, I listed a few reasonable ideas 👍🏻

Report · Dec 31, 2023

Hi, @MazStudios, fair responses, let me elaborate:

Cars: One person in these forums time how long it takes to scroll through thousands of photos by a particular mechanism: pressing the arrow key. They ignore any other mechanism that may be faster; that's the approach they take (even though other approaches are faster). However, even with that approach, what I see is nothing that is usable. I can't see individual images flying by, so to demand that level of speed is useless — only a mechanism to gripe with. So, to have a car that can go 200 mph is only an advertising mechanism, because there's no street upon which you can legally drive those speeds. It's useless.

Now, the "I'm not having issues; therefore, no one is:" First off, that's not what I said. I said others are not having issues. Not ALL others, just others. It's well known that people are much more likely to state their problems than their lack of problems. These folks do pop up here, but they are in the minority. And trust me, I do wish that these bad issues that are showing up here ARE resolved because, like robbery, I'd like them to be fixed BEFORE I have these problems.

But the point I am again making is that the problems are NOT universal. If they were, it would be much easier for Adobe to fix them. However, when a problem is intermittent or only affects a percentage of all users, it can be much more difficult to nail down and fix. It's like the noise in your car that's driving you crazy until you drive into the mechanic. Then there's nothing to fix because nothing is making that noise.

I am not claiming you are not having issues — I know you are. You are not the only one. But something else is going on here, and I really wish it could be resolved. Trust me, I do.

[abuse removed by moderator]

Report · Dec 31, 2023

I'm m honest having a hard time understanding what it is you exactly are arguing about 🙂

Some people have problems. Yes. Some are. Quite a lot actually since the internet is bigger than these forums. As you probably can read everyone talking about the problems refers to the same experience. It all started after 12. That's it.

And yes. It is very interesting. So thinks adobe since the worked with me at a point pinpointing the problem. They said they fixed it. They didn't.

And again. We all know what it is. To many variations of system and bad code can't handle it.

but we all want to know WHY this happened. They need to be transparent.

feel free to answer if you know something me and many other industry people don't know. Otherwise it just seems that you try to defend a produthat have gotten MUCH worse after v12 with no noticeable argument other than "I don't agree".

Report · Jan 01, 2024

@gary_sc nobody can work productively with photos that flit past them as blurred wallpaper. However, the speed at which programs can render data and switch between different contexts is an important subjective metric. Humans like when programs feel snappy – and fast response times avoid user-mistakes. That's measurable.

Users with powerful computers are used to blazingly fast data turnover from efficient programmes. Slow apps that don't use system resources properly feel awful in direct comparison. As the analogy with cars was made: even if you rarely drive a fast car at its top speed, it feels great to know about its performance reserves. It is unpleasant to switch from such a sports car back to an old banger that only runs on three of its six cylinders and exhausts fuel unburnt. And it is of little consolation that it has recently been repainted.

Individual work context plays a major role. Do you manage your precious collection of private photos, or retouch rather small series of high-end portrait shots? In such scenarios, performance is likely to play a lesser role than if you have to sift through hundreds or thousands of new photos a day. And have half a dozen editing programmes open on 3 screens.

***

There are fun studies on social interaction in software forums. Characters range from die-hard brand loyalists to perpetual ragers, who are unwilling or unable to present their criticisms in a way that's helpful to developers.

Yup, it can be maddening that so much user-input simply bounces off. But every long-winded post that talks about 'knowing the original makers of Bridge' or raves 'how great Bridge CS6 was' is in vain from the start.

Adobe Bridge gets coded by young folks in India, who are not graphics users themselves. They don't feel your pain – and they certainly feel zero responsibility for the history of Bridge: Most of them likely were toddlers when the first version of Bridge got released.

If we want this app to improve, there is no way around naming problems in concrete, illustrated and reproducible ways.

Report · Jan 03, 2024

For what *I* need to do, Bridge is broken. Its unreliable, crashes more than every other app I use put together, its slow, the UI has a lot of problems, and v13/v14 are just disasters. And sorry but the dev team should have never gone down the tab road. The only place I use tabbed documents is a web browser.

As for the dev team, my opinion isn't good. They create more bugs than they fix, they ignore current customer needs and standards, they take FOREVER to fix problems, and they really made a mess of the last two versions.

If I had a better tool to do my job, i wouldn't use Bridge at all. Unfortunately I haven't found anything else that I can extend with scripting and that supports other Adobe software and Camera RAW.

Report · Jan 03, 2024

I just want my preview panel to show a preview of the photo I click on...I have the cache on an internal SSD hard drive that is dedicated to the role of holding the cache for 30 days. (As a professional photographer, I have 10-15 projects a month that need to be rendered and used then discarded, so the cache is supposed to be constantly loading and purging - that is not happening either!)

I just want bridge to do the job it used to do!

I also want the preview to be immediatly a non-blurry rendering of the photo - the waiting for the entire photo to populate is killing my workflow - this happens even after the entire directory of photos have been active on the desktop for 2-3 hours! The cache is supposed to hold all of the rendered previews not just the ones that have already been selected!

Report · Jan 22, 2024

i love Bridge and was encouraged to see we're able to open a separate Bridge window, but i don't really care for the menu option that indicates it's opening a Secondary window. I still use it all the time and I don't want to see it go away. But I would appreciate whatever improvements can be made to make it more stable. For quite a while now I find that it crashs more frequently. I tell all my co-workers how great Bridge is for batch exporting and for assisting in my daily work flow. Please don't give up on Bridge!