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Provides: Dynamic parsing of images, media, and pages (PDFs and InDesign) and is focused on the programs of the Creative Suite.
Format: DVD
Developer: Adobe
Minimum Requirements: Mac OS X v10.4.11
Processor Compatibility: Universal
Availability: Out now Retail Price: Free with almost every Adobe product, but cannot be obtained separately.

Bridge has gone through some extensive and subtle changes since CS3, and the vast majority of them are fantastic. For viewing images and being sort of a central command point for most of the Adobe Suite, Bridge continues to keep me happy, productive, and on track with my work. The good news is that one of the biggest complaints with Bridge has been the speed of thumbnail image generation, and this has improved. Unfortunately, the need to refresh the image cache for seemingly small alterations has not gone away. Despite that frustration, Bridge continues to be one program that is always running on my computer. Sadly, not all is a happy road, as output from Bridge for PDF and Web Galleries is now extremely disappointing.

The whole existence of Bridge will be met with a round of yawning from a variety of those who've yet to see what Bridge is for and what it can do. At a minimum, if you use any type of image in your work (photos (jpegs, raw, dng, png, gif, tif, etc.), Illustrator art, and movies (mov, flv, mp4, etc.), as well as PDFs, InDesign documents, and a few other types), Bridge lets you review, view, sort, catalog, and filter. If you never need to review, view, sort, catalog, and/or filter your work, you do not need Bridge.

For a bit more background on what's in Bridge and how it has changed, see my review of Bridge CS3. The basic structure of Bridge is no different from CS3, and is seen below. Although the basic structure is the same, there are a significant number of important differences. Now, accessing the location of the images you are looking at, your workspace, and your sorting focus is immediately accessed and available.

[Click on the image above to see a full sized image.]

Starting off are Workspaces that run across the top in bold, all-capitol letters (as seen below). One basic dynamic of Bridge is that you have potentially eight different Panels to display, and any of them can appear on the left or right (full height and/or top and bottom), or the center region of Bridge. In addition, they can be adjusted to just about any dimension. That means there's up to about a kazillion different ways for Bridge to be displayed, and you may wish to revisit those views in the future. So, there are workspaces. In CS3, Adobe came up with three buttons that were in the bottom right corner of the window that one could assign the saved workspaces. There was about as much unanimity of support for these as there was unanimity of confusion as to what they were and why they did not perform consistently when you clicked on them. Now, each Workspace gets its own name and appears across the top of the window. The wider you stretch the window, the more of the workspaces show. If the one you are looking for doesn't show, it can be found in the drop down arrow on the right side of the last seen workspace. Either way, click on, or select the workspace and Bridge reconfigures itself to display that saved state—which includes

Also referring to the image above, the Search field in the upper corner is for keywords of any image. The "Star" icon is one way to select Filtered items such as "3 or more Stars," or "Show all Labeled items." Hidden behind the Workspace list, seen in the drop down list, is the Sort drop down where you can chose to sort via the name, date created, date modified and seven other parameters, as well as Manually. The two squares to the left of the Star need a bit of explanation: One of the key differences between Bridge and most other software packages that display images is what is being used to generate the image being seen. Just about all images have an embedded thumbnail created in a JPEG format. This is what Mac Leopard uses for its "Cover Flow" view of images in the Finder. The quality of these JPEGs is generally low and occasionally poor. However, for a quick look, they are typically sufficient. When you are looking for a photo of Aunt Zelda, your primary concern is that the image is of Aunt Zelda. iView (now MS Expression Media) and Portfolio rely exclusively on these self-generated JPEGs. However, when you are trying to determine which of four images best shows the color or shading of a model's face (or Aunt Zelda), that JPEG doesn't cut it and you want to see the accurate version of the image you've selected. To do this, Bridge looks at each image and generates accurate renditions of each image. Unfortunately that takes more time than to just read the embedded JPEG. As a compromise, Adobe has added those two squares. If you click on the left one, all you get is the default JPEG. If you click on the right one, you can chose which type will displayed: the embedded image (unless you click on the image and then a proper thumbnail is generated) or generated thumbnails exclusively.

New to Bridge is a Bird Trail reference showing the location of your images and the links to get there. As shown below, each step is contained within the step to the left. If you right-click on any arrow, you can either navigate to a new folder at that crossroad or show all the contents of all the folders at that point ("Show Items from Subfolders"). One frustrating bug seems to be if your computer is generating a considerable number of thumbnails, you cannot successfully right-click to include the subfolder items until all images are generated. However, at any time before the images are generated, you can still go up to the View menu and select "Show Items from Subfolders" from there with no problems.

Also seen in the above image is the Bridge icon that does absolutely nothing, and left and right arrows to return to previous or next views from where Bridge was. The down facing arrow lets you go to your default and/or favorite folders. The "clock" icon shows recent folders you been to. The little "camera" icon lets you start the Photo Downloader software (this can also be configured to start automatically when a camera or camera flash storage card is connected to your computer). The funny looking circle is for opening JPEGs or TIFFs in Camera Raw. Lastly, the page icon with the arrow to the right is to open the Output module.

The Output module, aptly named, is to place your images somewhere and/or get them into a state where they can be used somewhere. The results are both good and, well, not so good.

The good is the Export to JPEG. If you shoot raw, and/or have files from a 16 megapixel camera, you know that when you want to send files to a client or friend, you can't send them those files. You need to turn them into JPEGs, reduce the file sizes, perhaps rename them, add some metadata info, whatever. The Export to JPEG is curious because it looks dramatically different from any other aspect of Bridge. My guess is that it was created by a rouge group within Adobe that did this on assignment. Whatever the origin, they did a good job. You can do a significant amount of customizing on how the images are processed and where they will be put, including FTP-ing the image to a server of your choice. Besides the four pre-made Presets (E-mail, full size, Preview, Thumbnail), you can create any others you may want and save them for future use.

[Click on the image above to see a full sized image.]

One of the losses from Photoshop are the plug-ins for Contact Sheet II, Picture Package, and Web Photo Gallery. (If you do not have CS3 to save them from, these are still available for download from Adobe. You can place these items in your plug-in folder and still enjoy them. They

Picture Package was replaced with nothing. There is nothing to fill the void, it is gone.

Contact Sheet II was replaced with PDF Output. If you wished for improvements to Contact Sheet II, get ready for a major step backward. You are limited to placing images in rows and/or columns, and at best can rotate images for best fit. If you want, there can be one image per page. You can add the file name (in any font). You can add a watermark (in any font). If you want to be fancy, you can provide transitions from page to page, and you can add passwords for Opening and/or Permissions. You can't number the pages, you can't name the pages, there is no way to leave comments for the images, and you can't save the images at optimum quality (only "High" or "Low" quality). However, once you've customized what you can, there is no way to save those custom settings. Change the Template to a different one to see what it offers, and any customization just done will

Web Photo Gallery is no better.

Before I explain why Web Photo Gallery has some major problems, let me briefly explain some of the dynamics required to place your images on the web. First off is file dimensions; if you half the size of your image, you decrease the storage size by 3/4. That is, if an image is 2,000 pixels wide and 800KB in storage size, if the image were decreased to 1,000 pixels, it will be around 200KB in size. The second parameter is compression; JPEG images are compressed in a format that is called "lossy" because the more it is compressed, the more data that is actually removed from the image. The more data that is removed, the greater the image quality is degraded. Thus, to obtain the smallest image possible, one needs to reduce the dimensions as much as desired and compress the image as much as desired. The "desired" is limited to what still gets enough of the image across. Big enough to see what needs to be seen (but not too big) and compressed enough to not degrade the image (too much).

Then, image must be processed into a pleasant viewing structure that allows the viewer to navigate a series of images in a pleasant experience.

These can be two separate processes, but no longer with the new Web Photo Output.

For me, one of the strengths of the old Web Photo Gallery was that one of the options you had was to not resize the original image. This meant if you manually reduced the size of each image and properly prepared each image to look its best (at the smallest storage size), you could have the Web Photo Gallery take each image as you prepared it and used it as it was and not re-save it all over again (no JPEGing a JPEG). Well, that's gone. Thus, there is essentially no benefit of manually reducing the images in size and optimizing each image on a one-by-one basis. What I did find was that there appears to be zero compression on the images, which meant that images I had compressed to about 90 KB were processed and ended up at 130 KB in size. In other words, while I was trying to compress my images the maximum possible, after processing the images, they came out larger in storage size.

To Web Gallery's strength, the choices of galleries are not bad. Customization is available, but perhaps not as deep as you'd like. There are several HTML options and one Flash option. The Flash option is labeled "LightRoom Flash Gallery" and, as its name says, it's almost directly from Lightroom. When I say "almost," I mean it has significantly fewer options for customization and, like PDF Output, you can't save any customization you create. So, if you alter any settings and then shift to one of the variety of pre-made Templates, you've lost any of the customizations you've just made. After working with both the Bridge and Lightroom Web Gallery, I ended up working with, and using the LightRoom Flash Gallery in LightRoom and left Bridge's version to sit and be (rightly) ignored.

My only comment about both PDF Output and Web Gallery is that if you do not care about any alterations on an image when decreased in dimensions, do not care if the images occupy more storage space (and therefore will travel more slowly across the web), have minimal needs, and no real wish to save any templates, the Web Gallery Output will do the job and work fine. However, if you have any desire to alter any of the settings and are not likely to ever want to reuse the same customization ever again, and have some desire to obtain the best possible version of a reduced size image, you are best advised to completely ignore these features.

Not wanting to leave on a sour note, let me finish with two new additions to viewing your images. First, if you have an image selected in the Content Panel and press the "Spacebar" on your keyboard, the image will expand to fill (proportionally) the entire Bridge window. This is particularly handy if you are looking at a slew of small thumbnails in a Light Table view of your images, or the Preview Panel isn't very large. In addition, if you click into this view, it will expand to 100%. Click-holding and dragging will let you drag the image around your screen. [Note: you can also do this to a limited degree in the Mac Finder. If you click on an image in the Finder and then tap the Spacebar, the generated JPEG image (mentioned earlier) will be displayed.]

A more "gadgety" new feature is called "Review." Review is a new way to review images that is more interactive than the Slideshow feature (which has not had any changes). To implement, you select the images you wish to Review, and press Command-b (or select from the View menu), and then your entire computer screen is filled with a "ring-like" view of your images with one image foremost. You can then either press the left or right facing arrow seen in the bottom left of the screen, the right and/or left arrow keys on your keyboard, or you can mouse down and "flick" the image to the left or right and the next image on the carousel will slide into the foremost position. If you flick down, click the down arrow on your keyboard, or click on the down arrow on the bottom left of the screen, the foremost image is pulled (deselected) from the collection.

In the Review mode, you can rate the image (with one to five stars) or give the images labels. The one difference between the Review mode and the Slideshow is that you can narrow the images down to a select few. On the bottom right are three controls, and the middle one lets you name the remaining images into a new "Collection" that you can deal with later. If you are wishing to impress a client, Review is kinda cool, and the fact that you can save out a collection is obviously very efficient. On the other hand, in Slideshow mode, the image will fill the screen (depending on the size of the original image). In Review mode, the image is limited to the constrained size as seen above. Thus, this is a feature you probably want to use on a large monitor as opposed to a laptop screen.

In short, the UI improvements in Bridge are wonderful. I love the bird trail feature and I also love the easy access to custom Workspaces. I use Bridge daily, and after working with Bridge-CS4, working with Bridge-CS3 seems punitive. On the other hand, the Output features and functionality in CS4—specifically, the PDF and Web Gallery features—are profoundly disappointing. Because of these limitations, rating Bridge is very hard. If it were just the UI dynamics of the good, this version would rate a 5, But the current Output features rate a 2. So, with that in mind, I guess you have to determine for yourself which aspect of Bridge you use; if you use Bridge as a tool to examine images to work with, snap back and forth between Photoshop and Bridge, and pull images into Dreamweaver, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, GoLive, whatever, than you will be very happy with Bridge. On the other hand, if outputting images into the Web and/or PDF are important to your needs, we (Mac users) can either use what's there (with the built-in limitations presented) or fall back on the CS3 plug-ins (with their built-in limitations). What I'm saying here is what's good is very good and what's bad is very bad, and if you need/depend upon that which I'm saying is good, you're good. If you depend upon that which I'm saying is bad, well, you're not so good.

• See our Adobe Creative Suite 4 overview.

___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.