Lightroom and Bridge

[Bill Carr]

A relatively new acquaintance of mine bought training sessions on Lightroom, and they told her to buy LR, PS, and Bridge.  I don't know that much about Bridge, but I thought that using LR eliminated the need for Bridge.  I watched a video on Bridge, and it called it "the central repository for all your creative assets".

Is there anything that Bridge does that Lightroom doesn't?

[RogerW]

Bridge is (a very good) file browser with lots of other facilities too.  Lightroom is a database utitlity that needs to be "made aware" of your files.  They fulfil different roles. As Bridge comes as part of a Photoshop installation, there's no reason not to have it if you're using Photoshop.

Bridge is very useful for looking for and previewing all sorts of files, not just images.

[john beardsworth]

Not for a photographer. It displays all types of file - PDFs, Excel, whatever - and is like a glorified version of Mac Finder or Windows Explorer. So unlike LR it doesn't catalogue your work and searches are performed directly on the file system rather than quickly by a database query. Many LR users never need Bridge.

The point is really whether she needs to supplement LR with Photoshop for pixel crunching activities like serious cloning. Some get by with Photoshop Elements.

John

[Bill Carr]

I watched a Kost tutorial on using LR and Bridge.  Great video, as always.  It looks like a lot of extra work to keep them synched.

[Hans Kruse]

A relatively new acquaintance of mine bought training sessions on Lightroom, and they told her to buy LR, PS, and Bridge.  I don't know that much about Bridge, but I thought that using LR eliminated the need for Bridge.  I watched a video on Bridge, and it called it "the central repository for all your creative assets".

Is there anything that Bridge does that Lightroom doesn't?

Since I started using Lightroom I saw no reason to use Bridge any more. Well for a short while I was using Bridge to run my output sharpening flow using Image Processor and some Photoshop scripts, but with Lightroom having resizing and output sharpening I didn't need this any more. Keeping Lightroom and Bridge in synch is really just about setting Lightroom to write xmp's. And if you have modified in Bridge or Photoshop using ACR then you need to read the changed metadata back into Lightroom. It can easily be done, but I hardly see any reason for it except for those who have setup a workflow around Bridge and Image Processor and Photoshop scripts.

[digitaldog]

There are many kinds of file types Bridge can access that LR can’t. If you are primarily working with image files (raws, TIFFs, PSDs etc), then LR is probably all you need. For people dealing with those files and Illustrator, Indesign files etc and have to incorporate them all in various projects, Bridge could be more useful. As stated, Bridge is a browser and can browse lots of file formats. LR is a database for images. I personally never use Bridge, have no need.