Bridge vs. Lightroom

Bridge CS4 is getting very slow now that it has to take care of over 20,000 images. Would Lightroom work faster? I have an iMac 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo running Mac OS X 10.6.2. Thanks!

Can you clarify what you mean by "take care of over 20,000 images?" For example, do you use Bridge to organize your images and to assign keyword tags?

By default Bridge uses a 1GB cache on your system drive. As more recent photos are opened in Bridge the cached previews of older images are deleted to maintain a constant 1GB cache. Since Bridge now has to generate previews for your newer photos then cache them, it can appear as slowing down but its functioning exactly as intended.

The best thing you can do is relocate Bridge's cache and Camera Raw's cache to another hard drive and increase the cache sizes. For example, my computer has a drive dedicated just to Photoshop's scratch disk, Bridge's cache, Camera Raw cache, and my Lightroom catalogs and backups. This allows me to dedicate 20GB to each cache (the Camera Raw cache is also shared by Lightroom) and the application runs just as fast today as the day it was first installed. Assuming you have other drives, you can simply move the Bridge cache by going to Edit > Preferences > Cache and in the location section deciding where the cache should be stored. Then do the same for the Camera Raw cache. If you're going to do that, Purge the existing cache first so it doesn't continue occupying disk space.

If you don't have another drive try purging the Bridge cache (Edit > Preferences > Cache > Purge cache) and the cache for folders that aren't in active use (Tools > Cache > Purge cache for folder "xxxxxx").

I doubt Lightroom will be any faster on your system.

cfibanez wrote in post #9231725
Bridge CS4 is getting very slow now that it has to take care of over 20,000 images. Would Lightroom work faster? I have an iMac 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo running Mac OS X 10.6.2. Thanks!

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Bridge works on a per folder basis, the number of images isn't so important. My Bridge cache has 35,000 images, my ACR cache has 12,000 objects but I suspect it's managing many more images than that it's a database structure.