Adobe Bridge is a nifty program and often overlooked part of the adobe suite that lets you navigate and organize files. It allows for easy access of native adobe files as well as many other media types. Perhaps the best feature is the ability to add metadata to any file. Much like when you add information to a song in iTunes, in order to make it easier to search and create “smart playlists.” Bridge lets you do this with the files on your computer, to create unique searchable fields. For instance you could add a tag for peanut butter, add the tag to all the references to peanut butter to your files, and poof- finding peanut butter becomes instantly easier.

screen-shot of my backgrounds folder.

The downside, is in the set up. Like setting up iTunes with a million tags for the sake of smart playlists, creating smart searchable, groupable, organized files takes quite a bit of time.

Also, as a mention, Adobe Bridge has the ability to create web photo galleries. For a quick setup, and a quick way to share some files over the Internet it is a nice feature. For the designer, however, it lacks clean code and the ability to customize.

screenshot of the web-gallery I created using Adobe Bridge