Filtering images and the Compact view

In this exercise, I'm going to show you a few more great ways to work with illustrations inside the Bridge, starting with filtering. Now, I was telling you at the end of the previous exercise that you can go to the Star icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, and choose Show 1 or More Stars or one of the other options in order to filter out your thumbnails according to Star ratings. Well, you can filter by other criteria as well, i.e. document size, date modified, file type, and so on, using the Filter panel.

So, click on the word Filter, which is located, by default, down here in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. Now, notice currently, there's not much to filter by, because these documents are so very similar, they were all created today my time, they're all .ai files. In fact, the only difference in so far as the Filter panel is concerned is their star ratings. Well, one of the things we can do inside the Bridge is we can look not only into a folder of files at a time, but a folder that contains subfolders of files.

So, if I click on Exercise Files, notice, by default, I'm just going to see the 13 subfolders, starting with 00_setup, and ending with 12_exporting. However, let's I want to see the contents of the subfolders as well, I'll go up to the View menu, and I'll choose Show Items from Subfolders. Then I will see this long list of files that goes on and on and on, as you can see, and you'll see more files than this. At this point in time, as I'm recording this chapter, I haven't gotten all the way through the fundamentals portion of the series, so there's going to be more files as well.

But notice now here inside the Filter panel that I have a lot more criteria populating this panel, and I'm going to go ahead and drag this horizontal bar up, so that I can see more of the Filter panel. Notice that I can twirl-open Date Created and see a bunch of different creation dates. Also, Date Modified will show me a bunch of different modification dates as well. I should see all kinds of different aspect ratios listed here, i.e. the ratio between the width and height of the illustration and so on. Now, what I'm most interested in at this point in time is the File Type.

Let's say, for example, I don't want to see these bogus folders sitting here. That's not doing me any good at this point in time, because they don't have any previews. I just want to be able to see my illustration and image previews. So, I'll start turning some of these options on. For example, I'll click on JPEG file to see all of the JPEG files that I've created so far, which is 1 at this point in time. Then if I click on kys, I can see that keyboard shortcut file that I created for the setup portion of the series. I've got a csf file, which is that Best Workflow file; I've got an EPS file as well.

I've got a few Photoshop documents, an SVG file, a TIFF image, a Word document, and then there's my Illustrator documents. I've got more than a hundred of them right now, I'm sure there'll be even more than that, by the time you view this exercise. Now that I've turned on everything but Folder, so that is to say I am seeing everything inside of the exercise_files folder as well as all of its subfolders, except for the folder names themselves. Then if I decide, you know what, I don't want to see the CSF file and I don't want to see the kys file, I can just turn those off, and I can turn off everybody, in fact, except for the Illustrator documents, and I will still be seeing a very long list of files.

Now, let's say you want to clear out all of the filtering criteria. Well, I then go back to your Star icon. This is a really interesting tip. Choose Clear Filter or press Ctrl+Alt+A, Command+Option+A on the Mac, and notice that the File Type criteria are completely cleared out, so that you're seeing everything inside of this folder including the subfolders. Then if you don't want to see the contents of the subfolders anymore, you go back to the View menu and turn off Show Items from Subfolders. All right. I'm going to switch back to the 03_open folder, because I want to show you a couple of other items.

Notice up here in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, we've got this icon that says Switch to Compact mode. If you click on it, you will switch to a compact view of the Bridge that allows you to grab files, and drag and drop them into other illustrations, like so. So, notice I just placed the 6-2 version of the floral pattern into the 6-1 document that I have open in the background inside of Illustrator. I just did that by dragging and dropping. However, the Bridge remains in the foreground.

So, I could go ahead and work inside of my illustration if I want to. I could drag this placed artwork to a different location, like so. The Compact View of the Bridge remains in front. Now, if I don't like that, if I want the Bridge in back of the active application, then I'd go to my little flyout menu icon, and I would choose Compact Window Always On Top in order to turn that function off. Notice also, by the way, that I have the option to switch to an Ultra-Compact mode, in which I'm just seeing the Title Bar and very little else. If I want to switch back to the Full mode, I click on this icon, or I want you to know a keyboard shortcut.

You can switch between the Full mode and the Compact mode by pressing Ctrl+Enter here on a PC, or Command+Return on the Mac. Then finally, one final little tip before we wrap things up here. Let's say for some reason your thumbnails are not updating properly inside the Content panel, whether you're not seeing a thumbnail rendered at all, or you're just seeing it rendered inaccurately, you can go up to the tools menu, choose the Cache command, and then choose Purge Cache for the active folder, in my case, 03_open.

That'll go ahead and get rid of those thumbnails and then turn right around and redraw them here inside the Content panel. That's how you make the most of the Adobe Bridge along with Illustrator CS5. In the next chapter, we're going to begin our first drawing.