CS5 Bridge Collection Problem

So my daughter's first bday party is in a few days... My wife spent several hours going through pictures from the last year to include in the bday video... she came up with nearly 400 after sifting through around 30k images. Dragging each one to a collection. That was yesterday, today Bridge crashed on me and when it came back up there were only 6 images in the collection.

ANY HELP! would be GREATLY APPRECIATED!!!! Is it possible that the pointer list is still siting somewhere on my PC and I can recover it??

If I can't, I likely won't be able to create the video in time for the party, ugh and you can imagine how my wife will feel about that...

I got this info from the Adobe web site - Not sure if it helps (I hope it does!) -Wow! 30k images of a baby in a year, thats over 80 a day, every day!)

A collection is an XMP file with a file name of "CollectionName.fileli​st".

It is located in ~Library/ApplicationSu​pport/Adobe/Bridge CS5/Collections/

C:\Users\ [I][Username][/I] \AppData\Roaming\Adobe​\Bridge CS5\Collections

There is a known problem with collections, if a filename has certain characters in it the collection will only show files upto this file. Hyphon, apostraphe are a couple that will stop it working.

Paul MR wrote in post #11623099
There is a known problem with collections, if a filename has certain characters in it the collection will only show files upto this file. Hyphon, apostraphe are a couple that will stop it working.

I can understand getting messed up with apostrophes, but are you sure a hyphen gets messed up? That's a very common character in file names. Could you post a cite for that?

Sorry you are right, i got it wrong! Using an apostrophe will stop collections working, I did thing that someone mentioned (Adobe Bridge Forums) other characters that stopped collections working.
This seems to only affect CS5 though.

Paul MR wrote in post #11624183
Sorry you are right, i got it wrong! Using an apostrophe will stop collections working, I did thing that someone mentioned (Adobe Bridge Forums) other characters that stopped collections working.
This seems to only affect CS5 though.

so are you thinking that if I find that file... and locate a file in the list that has an apostrophe, remove the file from the list, that the collection would still be intact?

Yes if that is what the problem is, the file is just a plain xml (text) file.

thanks... I'll try that this evening when I get home..

NinetyEight wrote in post #11622754
I got this info from the Adobe web site - Not sure if it helps (I hope it does!) -Wow! 30k images of a baby in a year, thats over 80 a day, every day!)

A collection is an XMP file with a file name of "CollectionName.fileli​st".

It is located in ~Library/ApplicationSu​pport/Adobe/Bridge CS5/Collections/

Mac location I believe (from Adobe web site info)

C:\Users\ [I][Username][/I] \AppData\Roaming\Adobe​\Bridge CS5\Collections

This is where my install of Windows 7 stores them


I m not sure how they get saved though, so if they require saving manually and the program crashed you may be out of luck

Paul MR wrote in post #11623099
There is a known problem with collections, if a filename has certain characters in it the collection will only show files upto this file. Hyphon, apostraphe are a couple that will stop it working.

RazorbackSam wrote in post #11624231
so are you thinking that if I find that file... and locate a file in the list that has an apostrophe, remove the file from the list, that the collection would still be intact?

Hallelujah!!! Thank you, thank you! You guys are great. I really appreciate the information and help you guys gave me... if you ever need anything, holla! My wife is going to be so happy that she doesn't have to sift throught 30k images of the family again to find hopefully the same 360 that she chose the first time!!

RazorbackSam wrote in post #11628099
Hallelujah!!! Thank you, thank you! You guys are great. I really appreciate the information and help you guys gave me... if you ever need anything, holla! My wife is going to be so happy that she doesn't have to sift throught 30k images of the family again to find hopefully the same 360 that she chose the first time!!

Are you saying you have solved the problem, or that you hope that you will solve the problem?

I solved (you guys solved) my problem.. i was able to recover the entire collection. There were in fact some paths for the files included that contained apostrophes... i removed those entries from the XML file and then restarted Bridge and the rest of the collection was displayed correctly. I then used the list of files that i removed from the XML file as a guide and renamed the offending folders to not include apostrophes and then added those files back to the collection.


Thanks again for your help!

Interesting -- was there something specific that you did "wrong" to cause that behavior?

no... well not exactly... but you could say that the act of creating the directory structure that included an apostrophe was the root of the problem. However you should be able to use an apostrophe without fear of applications not handling them correctly.