Jer Loc: Mesa, Arizona

Without the LR catalog how do you find pictures in different drives?

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

I have it. Before Lightroom came of age, I used it with Photoshop. Not needed now... UNLESS you use the full Adobe CC suite.

DaveC Loc: Illinois

]Without the LR catalog how do you find pictures in different drives?

Imagine Bridge as sort if a super Explorer. (It's actually far more than that.) On the left hand pane just scroll down and you will find your external drives shown. Click on one of them and continue just like your C drive. They do have to be on-line, however.

JD750 Loc: SoCal

You just navigate to the directory where the images are stored.

ronichas Loc: Long Island

This is how I have my Bridge set up. The top left column has my favorites, including my network hard drive, the current drive, folder with images, documents, etc.
The bottom has favorite textures I use in some images. The right side has some of the folders with all my images. I have 2 hard drives in my computer, a network hard drive and 4 external hard drives. I can access everything from Bridge.

Jer Loc: Mesa, Arizona

So what do you do when you got a large external drive attached and you select it. Then you want to find one picture that is somewhere in over a hundred different directories. Do you search it by the metadata tag that you attached to it. That's assuming you filled in the metadata with additional information.

ronichas Loc: Long Island

The photo I am searching for would be in a specific folder for that shoot. I might have to do a bit of searching thru the folder. It isn't much of a problem. With lightroom, you have to have uploaded the location of the folder where the images are, with bridge, I can search directly for it.

Jer Loc: Mesa, Arizona

I know how to use Lightroom. It really is a catalog program. By the way I'm not a fan of the program. However, the catalogs are complicated and can be approached on different levels. If you put your photos into the catalog it is a lot faster to search than with Bridge. I'm a fan of bridge. I use it all the time. I'm going to experiment with some things with it. However, I do think that Lightroom has the capacity to search all your drives connected or not. Now to accessed the files unless it's a smart photo then you need to drive connected. But even with smart photos you still eventually have to connect it so it makes all the updates. I was just hoping there was a better way that didn't require adding everything into your catalog. Adobe should make that optional. What I was doing for a while was setting up a dummy catalog for one-time projects. Then deleting the files from the catalog so it be blank again. Remember those are not the original pictures. Lightroom does not load the actual file into its catalog just the data. However I found that method cumbersome. So I'm looking for something better. Like I said I'll play with Bridge a little more.

blackest Loc: Ireland

I organise with lightroom and my photo's are on 3 drives 2 of them on my Nas which may or may not be connected either way I can still see my photo's even on a disconnected drive. Lightroom does tell me which drive it is on. There are a multitude of parameters I can search on. But its not really searching as such it's just data and metadata stored in a database. Theres no need to open a folder until you want to work with the file. I can have so many different views. Lets say I want photo's of Dogs i can click on the right arrow next to the dog keyword and instantly i have a selection of just dogs. I might be interested in one session in particular if I select 1 photo of interest a click on the date arrow and now i'm looking at all photo's from that day instead. It's near instantaneous you can't get that flexibility and speed by looking through files on a hard drive.

There is no reason you can't have both if you add in place there is no need to move anything.

sterrill Loc: missouri

I use bridge, Photoshop most of the time. I use Lightroom mainly for portraits. I suppose more sophisticated users of Lightroom prefer it.

Don's Leica Loc: Asheville, NC

I have for several years used Bridge for virtually all my photo processing. It is simple enough for me to understand, as opposed to the complexity available in Photoshop. And I do my own cataloging on my Mac, and seldom lose anything. Bridge does not move things around.

suntouched Loc: Sierra Vista AZ

I too use Bridge, Camera Raw and PS and OnOne. In Bridge you can move files from folder to folder to folder and Bridge can see it in the new location. With LR it was drama drama drama and tears of frustration trying to figure out why I couldn't find/see a photo or several photos and then the time it took to reorganize everything again-a mess! In Bridge I organize my folders by categories, subcategories, physical location and year. Pretty simple and intuitive for me.

Toolking Loc: Pacific Northwest

I search and select in Bridge.
Open in Camera Raw, do the basics then copy to PS (copy not open I want to keep the originals).
Do the details (if any) in PS.
Then save as...

russelray Loc: La Mesa CA

You can also open the original, do whatever you want to it, and then simply File Save As and give it a new name.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

I used Bridge or it's precursors back before Lightroom existed (I forget if they called it Bridge back then). It's waaaaaayyy too slow for what I need to do... quickly make proofs from several thousand images.

I use Lightroom now, though I also still use Photoshop to fully finish images. PS and LR complement each other very well.