Understanding caches

Imagine how much rendering of these photos is going on by Bridge when you, when you open a folder that's got 500 pictures or 1,000 pictures and it's popping those thumbnails in there, there's a lot going on there. And one of the things that Bridge does so that you get to see those faster is that is does this thing called caching. So watch this folder here as I double click and open it for the first time. See how long it's taking some of those files to give us thumbnail? Taking it a while. There we go, there we go. Now we've got it, OK? Now I'm going to get off of that folder and now watch the second time I go see it.

Ready? Boom. It's already there because the preview of those files has already been cached. Let's go look at another folder. Let's go to, say, this folder that has a lot of pictures in it. Okay, you can see that as I'm scrolling down, it's taking it awhile. Okay, and if I scroll back up, notice how some of these have a dark line around them and it's slowly going away? That's because it rendered a very low res preview to us very quickly, so we can get an idea of what it is, and while we're sitting at here looking at them it's rendering the higher quality preview. Well that rendering is going into this cache.

And that cache is great for speeding up your work. But it also, well it takes up file space on your hard drive, and depending on the power of your computer it may be causing you problems. So I want to show you a couple things about caching that's important. Let's say that you feel like these aren't rendering properly, they're all low-res or whatever. You can go to View > Refresh, and it will go through that folder and it will refresh the Preview and you can see it doing it right now. It's going through.

You can also go to Tools, Cache and you can purge the cache for that and you can just throw the cache away and now it's re-rendering everything. That's only for this folder though. If you've got folders within folders within folders, and you've been using Bridge for a long time, there may very well be thousands and thousands of these cache files. So let's go to Preferences in Bridge, and let's go to the Cache tab there. And let's look at a couple choices that we have here. Well, first of all we can keep 100% previews in cache.

I'm going to go ahead and do that. Okay? And I can also choose a location for the cache file. I actually have never had a reason to move that. Someone in your IT department, or you may have a reason to move that, but I just leave it on the default. And I can choose a new location if I want to. Maybe if you've got multiple hard drives and you want to have it written to a second one or there's a folder you want to have quicker access to, it's all possible. I just leave it on the default. Now, when I manage these I can control the cache size making it smaller or larger.

I tend to go larger because I tend to have more room on my hard drive for this stuff, and I want those because I want to have quick access to those pictures. Every once in a while, though, you may want to compact your cache. What this is going to do, and you can read it right here, it's going to improve your performance by optimizing it. Previously cached items that are no longer available may be removed, and that's kind of important. Let's say that you are a photographer, at a newspaper or magazine, you bring your photos in, you're using bridge boom, boom, boom, boom you're going through that, and it's creating cash, creating cash.

When you're done with the project, you take all those photos burn it to a DVD, and you put it up on a shelf. Well, those photos aren't even on this server anymore or, or on your computer. So you might as well compact the cache. What that's going to do is get rid of the ones that aren't there, while optimizing the cache for the images that are there. There may come a time though when you want to purge everything. And when I do that it's saying, you're getting rid of thumbnails for all folders. Are you sure you want to do that? And I hit Okay, and now it's gone through my computer and it threw away every single cached file there was.

And you can see that it's now redrawn the one that we're in. So these cache files are kind of important that they help us speed up our work. But we also need to remember how to manage 'em. And if we find that we're having some problems with bridge opening It's acting slow or it's even crashing on us, first place I go, purging the cache.