Bridge So Sloooooowwwww

Why Oh Why, is Bridge so very slow when importing files from my CF card, yet ACD 8.0 or even cut a paste(drag and drop) within explorer is significantly faster......this may be a dumb question (as I do not see how it could be ), but am i losing any information, data, quality by using ACD or just explorer to do my imports......I like Bridge with that single major exception

IMO there are several performance issues with the CS2 pack from Adobe and InDesign has been a very discussed topic in their forum.
E.g. InDesign sometimes just slows down without any explanation - very strange. It is 99,99% going to fixed in the CS3 suite (hopefully) soon to come.
In the case of Bridge I too sometimes have performance issues, even though I have a high speed dual core CPU. However, on my father's dual core MAC G5, there are no difficulties.
So the answer - sorry just wait for the CS3 with patience.

Regarding your second question; there shouldn't be any problems with using these programs. The picture itself contains the information about the picture and the programs here doesn't affect them at all.

There's been a new point release for InDesign in the past couple of days - InDesign CS2 4.0.3. Some of the listed fixes are performance related.

I find Bridge much better if you upgrade Bridge to the latest version and, if it's installed, upgrade Adobe Stock Photos to the latest version.

David

some ideas - maybe you'll find a work around...

Bridge can operate as a standalone app & with CS2 open.

I think I remember reading someplace that generally bridge operates faster when CS2 is open...

I have my preferences set (within CS2) to have bridge set to open automaticallty then CS2 is open.

I have my preferences set ( within bridge) to save the image cache data to "use decentralized cache files when possible" - I think the default is a centralized cache and if you have it set to centralized that may be slowing things down if it's gets too large.

I also have my preferences set (within bridge) in camera raw preferences to save image settings in sidecar (xmp files) and not in camera raw database - again I think the default is the database but if it gets too large that could slow down things. There are also other advantages to saving the image settings in the sidecar files but that's for a later discussion.

I use windows explorer to transfer images from my cards to the hard drive via a firewire compact flash card reader. Once the image folder is transfered to the HD I use bridge to preview it - fast preview.

upon readeading your original post - are you accessing your photos directly from your card reader in bridge?

If you are that's your problem - first transfer the whole folder to your HD and access them from the HD.

eg. you might be using USB 1 devices

If you look at the size of Bridge in "Add or Remove Programs" in the control panel, Bridge takes up 454 megabytes of space! (nearly 400 floppy disks for you old duffers!!!!) Why in the world does it have to be that large? 99% of it is probably useless (or not used) to 99% of us users. But, we ALL (or our old computers) have to deal with its behomoth size. I've opted not to use it a whole lot.

We need to know some specs on your computer too...your computer might be too slow to handle an app like bridge. However, I doubt it. I find that bridge isn't a downloader per se, but rather an explorer of sorts with some add-ons that make it sexy. Lightroom is supposed to be the downloader, explorer, etc. It's in beta now for mac and you can sign up for a windows beta when it becomes live.

http://labs.adobe.com/​technologies/lightroom​/

in my control panel ( add / remove) Adobe Bridge is 88 mb - that's only 88 floppy's for the Gen X crowd. Take a look at my posts above - you probally have the setting set to their defaults.

The only time Bridge is slow for me is when it's building the cache for a directory with several hundred images. Even then, that only takes a few minutes. Perhaps you need to install the updates?

I am using Bridge to import from the CF card, via the "import from camera" scripting that is available on adobe.com (learned of it in the "camera raw" book)

My PC is a HP d4100y with a 3.2 ghz dual core processor.....4 gig of ram, two 250 gig internal HD and 2 250 Gig external firewire drives running XP Media Center (guessing pc performance is not the issue)

All updates are installed.....really like bridge except as the import tool..
Looks like best bet is to use ACD import, it is very fast and if there is not any file degradation (I would be surprised by any)

Thanks for the thoughts!!

I've never heard of anyone using Bridge to import from their CF cards. Is there an inherent advantage of doing it this way.

I prefer to copy from my CF card to a folder on my pc, then I rename/renumber and get rid of the obvious losers. I do all of this with breezebrowser. If I happened to shoot JPG I then start CS2 and bridge and go from there. If I had shot RAW, which I do most of the time I normally process them in C1. I have started bridge and allow it to load all of my CR2 files (once copied to my pc) and they loaded very fast.

I used to review, cull, and copy and rename from Bridge with no issue, but now I copy the whole folder via Windows Explorer for no other reason than it seems easier.

Use a USB2 card reader, and use DIM from http://www.alanlight.c​om to download your images. Bridge is a good image processor, but by the sound of it a terrible image downloader.

tim wrote:
Use a USB2 card reader, and use DIM from http://www.alanlight.c​om to download your images. Bridge is a good image processor, but by the sound of it a terrible image downloader.

Not really, as long as you using USB 2.0. It works like any other downloader. The issue more likely the time it takes to build the cache, which it will do when opening up the card reader "drive" in the folder list. Otherwise, it's exactly the same as moving folders around in Bridge.

If anyone is interested in really getting the most value from Bridge, read "The DAM Book", Digital Asset Management for photographers, by Peter Krogh.

As has been stated above, copy files to your HD (a temp dir?) first. Then, use Bridge to import them. BUT, do it with the Bridge script called Import From Camera. You point it to your files directory, tell it where you want the imported files, what to change in the names, what to add to the metadata on the way, whether to also make a second copy to a backup dir, whether to pre-build the cache, etc. etc etc.
I HIGHLY recommend reading this book. You will never again consider Bridge a "wasted" addition to CS2.