A tour of workspaces in Bridge

One of the best parts about Adobe Bridge is that its interface is completely customizable to meet our specific needs. Now in order to get a feel for how you might want to customize it, Bridge ships with several different workspaces that we can see across the top here. Now, we're going to take a closer look at these in just a moment. But right now, I want us to all be sure that we're looking at the same workspace. So go ahead and click where it says Essentials, and then use the triangle here to select Reset workspace.

That way I know that we're all looking at the same thing. Now as I mentioned before, Bridge has nested some of its panels together. So for example, the Favorites and the Folders are nested together. And you just click on the name of the tab there for that panel in order to bring it to the foreground. We saw how clicking on an image would then show a preview of that image on the right hand side. And selecting more than one image shows us both of those images. Now if we select a lot of images. So say for example, I click on the first image, and then hold down the Shift key, and click on the last image in that row.

Well, I have ten items selected but you should just know that the maximum number that Bridge will display in the preview area is nine items. So it will tell you if you have more than that selected. Alright, below that we have our Metadata panel, where you can see things like the file properties, or information about the files. We can look at the IPTC information, that's metadata that we can add. So, things like our contact information and copy right information plus a lot of other information that we'll go into a little bit more in-depth in other lessons.

We also have a Key Word panel. So this is a panel dedicated to adding key words to enable us to find our images later on. So that's going to be a really handy panel that we'll use. Moving back over to the left hand side, we have some filters. So, once we're shooting lots of images, we'll want to be able to filter down to maybe just the images that have 2 star rating on them or filter by keywords. So, this becomes a very important panel. And then we have our Collections panel which we can use to create, kind of virtual collection.

So, if we went on 4 different trips to 4 different locations, we could just select our top images from each of those shoots and without rearranging them on the hard drive, we could put them in a virtual collection. So, again, we'll be talking more in-depth about these topics in later lessons. But there might be times when you don't need access to all of these panels, or maybe you want to make some of the other panels a little bit larger or smaller. Well, you can do this by positioning your cursor between any of the panels.

You'll get the double headed arrow and then you can just click and drag those splitters to re-arrange and make one panel larger and the other panels smaller. So those are the vertical splitters. But of course you can also change the horizontal splitters as well, making one area larger and another one smaller. If I wanted to nest the panels together differently, then I could click on the tab for the panel that I want to move. And you'll notice if I drag it up here it will give me a blue highlight. And when I let go, it will actually nest the keywords with that preview panel. If instead I don't want to nest the keywords with preview, but I want it to have its own space in the panel, then I'll drag down below or between these two panels where there's just a single solid blue line. Let go of my cursor, and now you can see that preview and keywords and the Metadata panel all have their own place to be on that right-hand side. So obviously we can customize this.

But let's take a look at some of the different workspaces that Adobe has created for us to try to kind of make their best guess for different layouts for different workflows. If I want to see the filmstrip, I can either use the command key plus F2 or just click where it says filmstrip. You can see that some of the panels are hidden in this workspace. So you don't always have to have all of the panels showing. For all of the different tasks that you do. Now if I just select a single image we can see in the preview area.

It's much larger so I get a much bigger view of my image. So this is really nice when you're just quickly moving through a lot of images. The Metadata workspace tells me a lot of information about each image here in the content area and it hides that Preview area, and instead I can see the Metadata as well as the Filter Panel over here. If we click on Keywords, again I get a larger visual here of my content with a lot of information about each file and I also get the Keywords panel to the left. If we click on the Drop Down Arrow, you'll notice I also have a Preview workspace.

This is probably the largest preview that I would get of my images. Or we have the Light table, which just gives me the Content panel and hides all of my other panels. And finally, we have our Folders. So, this should give you a good idea of how maybe you can hide and show the different panels in order to meet your needs. So, let's say, for example, that we go back to the Preview panel here but I also want another panel showing that's been hidden.

Then I'll go under the Window menu and you can see all the panels that are showing have the checkmark next to them. If I want to see panels that aren't showing, I can use the Window menu here and then I can select any of the unchecked panels. So the ones with the checks on them, obviously we're seeing. But if I want to see the Metadata panel, I simply select it and it will appear. Now in this case it was grouped with Preview. But, like we did a moment ago, I can go ahead and nest that in any other grouping or create my own. So once you've decided what panels you want to see and how large you want to see each one of them, you can create your own custom work space by clicking on the Arrow and then choosing New workspace.

And I'll just call this jkost. And I'm going to Save the window location as well as the Sort Order. That's something we haven't talked about, but the Sort Order right here determines the order that I see my images in the content area. So I can choose whether or not I want to Save those by just checking it on or off. Go ahead and click Save and now you'll notice up here at the top the first option is my workspace. If I wanted to change the order of these workspaces say for example, I didn't like the Filmstrip workspace and I wanted to demote it I can just click and drag that over to the right. I can also use this little grabber bar right here. To stretch this out so that I see more workspaces.

That way if I liked, for example, the light table, I could go ahead and move this to the third position. If I didn't like the workspace I just set up, I could scoot this down to maybe the fifth position. Then we'll go ahead and tidy that up by just making it a little bit smaller. And now I want to reset the workspace to the Essentials. So, I'll click on Essentials, but that's not actually the default because remember, we made changes by grabbing these splitter handles, and we also rearranged the panels. So if I really want to get back to the Essentials, not only do I need to select it but I also need to choose to Reset the workspace.

And now we're all back at the default Essentials workspace. One quick shortcut, if I just want to see this content area larger and I want to hide all of the panels on the left and the right. I can tap the Tab key to temporarily hide those panels and then I can tap the Tab key again whenever I need to see them again. It's kind of a quick way to go from the Essentials to the Light Table view, without having to actually change my workspaces. So as you can see the interface in Bridge is completely customizable in order for you to get the tools you need for your specific workflow and the tasks that you're trying to accomplish.