LR or Bridge?

[mdijb]

I am primarily interested in viewing, sorting, arranging, and searching for images, and then using ACR or LR/develop to fine tune the images. The printing,and other modules in LR do not interest me.

After viewing several videos from the adobe site, it appears that Bridge can do almost everything that LR does in this regard. Is my impresaion correct??

Dealing with years worth of folders in my current structure seems like a lot less work than learning a whole new program.  It seems that one can use Keywords, metadata, etc and applying via Bridge and retaining the browser capability instead of creating whole new libraries and and the required storage locations would be easier.  Is that a correct view??

MDIJB

[macgyver]

For what you are describing I think Bridge would work better. It will be more of a pure browser than Lightroom and if you aren't going to use any of the other modules then you might as well go with the slimmer program.  However, LR can index your current file structure, so if you want to you LR you shouldn't have to make new libraries.

Also, I'd recommend taking a look at Camera Bits Photo Mechanic as well, it does what bridge does but I find it to be a much faster, much more reliable approach. I love Photoshop CS3, however, I have had nothing but pain and heartache with Bridge; I find it totally reliable and slow to boot, even on modern systems. If you are big on keywording and other metadata, Photo Mechanic has one of the nicest ingest features I've ever seen.