[water]

..and what does it do?.Is it just an Organiser/Viewer?.I have it as part of CS2 but never used it.

[Rob Barron]

Yes, pretty much what you've said Water. It is a photo organiser and storage system that allows you to sort all our photos and put them in places you can find them again! You can do all the usual stuff like adding keywords and rating them so you can pull them together. For example you could pull out all your best Portraits or whatever.

Must admit I don't tend to use it a whole lot, just occasionally when I want to look at all the EXIF info but I have been using my own system for years and am so used to it I can't be bothered to change. I can use Bridge with my system and view my pictures easily enough so that's fine for me.

Cheers,
Rob

[stepheno]

Originally Posted by water

Is it just an Organiser/Viewer?.

You said it although I never use it. I have a fairly high spec machine but I find Bridge too slow to open and work. So I use Lightroom since it's an organiser, viewer and RAW converter and I use CS3 just for final tweaks.

[Dave Canon]

I guess the Bridge might be considered similar to Lightroom so most folks would use one or the other. I used to use other software for organising but since I bought CS3 last March, I use the Bridge all the time. The CS3 version is a little more user friendly than the CS2 version. You can do most things from the Bridge such as organising, rating, selection, re-naming, Raw editing, CS3 special processing, opening files in CS3 (or Elements). I only have to go into CS3 for final editing and printing. As I do not have Lightroom, I could not imagine not using the Bridge now. I have not noticed Bridge being slow to open (just checked less than 3 seconds) and nor does it generally run slow. I do find it sometimes takes a while to open all thumbnails in a large file but so did my previous version of Photoshop.

[_MB_]

It basically does what windows does re viewing photos, but about 359,000 times slower

[water]

Righty-ho chaps,I get the the picture!! [oh shut up John].I have received,from my brother,the student discounted version of CS3 and will really have to work out a system for organising my photos.This when I get a new computer and external hard-drive as I will not try to put CS3 on my present machine.A fresh start so to speak.Also,I am starting to weed out the 'ordinary' shots with a more critical eye now,just as I had to start doing with slides.I found I was keeping everything but the obviously crap [and there are plenty of those!!]