Taken many pictures recently? Twenty, thirty or maybe one hundred or six thousand? Sorting them is a pain. Editing the right ones, making comparisons and separating the wheat from the chaff can take quite some time. But luckily that often overlooked Adobe Application is here to help. Bridge. Go on, open it and let’s delve into your photo library.
In this 2-part tutorial I will show you three things: Ratings and Labels, Collections and Smart Collections. Each can be used on their own or in combination. Once you start using them you will wonder how you ever did without them; I know I do. Here in part 2 I will show you how to use Collections and their ‘Smart’ counterpart.
Collections
In part 1 of this tutorial we found out that this was one very happy wallaby with a Blue Approved label and a 5-star rating. However, even with this useful labeling tools I still have to find the photo. We also found out that by using filtering we can narrow down the photos displayed significantly, but there are still quite a few other photos there. I could narrow it more with star ratings but what if I want to see all of the wallaby photos together with no others?
This is where collections come in. They are folders of photos that exist only in Bridge. You can create as many as you want and put any photo from anywhere into it. Do not fret though, putting a photo in a collection does not move it from your hard drive, they always stay put. However, be careful when moving photos outside of Bridge. If you do move its location and the photo is in a collection Bridge will probably not be able to find it and will produce an error. This means you have to manually locate it in order for it to appear in the collection again. With 200 photos, this could be a pain.
But how do you create a collection? Simple. Look again at the filters panel and next to it should be a tab that says ‘Collections’. If there isn’t, select Window -> Collections Panel. Then right at the bottom of the panel there are four buttons. Click the one third from the right to create a standard collection. If you have any photos selected at the time Bridge will ask if it should automatically put those in the collection. Then you can simply drag and drop photos into them. The same photo can go into multiple collections.
Smart Collections
Finally, Smart Collections. They work in the same way as their standard counterpart, but do the actual gathering of photos for you using criteria you set out for it. If you ever use Smart Playlists in iTunes you will find it works in a similar way.
To get started, open the folder of photos you want to be collected and then click the second button from the right in the collections panel. This will open the collection options. Here is where you specify the search criteria. Even if you have not labelled your photos, you can use this to automatically collect photos using many other options such as date, exposure time and colour mode.
To add multiple criteria, press the small plus button on the right. Do not forget to specify whether to only include photos that meet all the criteria, or just some of the criteria, by using the drop down at the bottom.
Once finished press Save to give your collection and name and see the gathered photos. My criteria told Bridge that the photos it displays must have the Approved Label, be in the RGB colour mode and have a rating higher than 2 stars. Also, the photos must match all three criteria (as the drop down near the bottom of the panel specifies.) This produces the following results.
You can edit the collection criteria by clicking the folder icon at the top right of the content view.
My criteria used above produces the following results.
Ah, there’s that photo.
