San Jose, CA—Adobe announced a major update to Bridge CC. V6.2 offers new features such as automated cache management, photo downloader support on OS X 10.11x (El Capitan) and auto-stack panoramic and HDR images.
Bridge CC was upgrade to allow users to quickly organize and process images on a desktop with improved performance for metadata and thumbnail generation, along with automated cache management for faster display and search of assets. Upgrades also include the ability to directly import media from smartphones and digital cameras.
“Bridge was brought back to be managed by Megan Donahue, director, Creative Cloud, and Arno Gourdol, Sr., engineering director, Creative Cloud, and their awesome teams,” the company blog stated. “Our team has been working on several new initiatives that enhance user experience around asset management used by Creative Cloud customers.”
The latest release of Adobe Bridge CC includes updates to the following feature sets.
Automated Cache Management
The central cache of Bridge stores thumbnails, previews and image metadata in a database. The database improves performance when users browse or search files. However, the larger the cache, the more disk space it uses. Cache preferences now help users manage the trade-off between performance and cache size. The update improves Bridge’s purging cache capability with automatic purging of stale cache items when the application is idle. There’s also a cache compaction option to set up cache cleanup at exit when the database size increases beyond a certain limit.
On-Demand Thumbnail Generation
To improve responsiveness when browsing through a large set of assets, Adobe made improvements to the way the thumbnails, previews and metadata are extracted/generated. Now when users select a folder, the thumbnails/previews are extracted on priority for only the on-screen assets. Thumbnails for the remaining files are generated on demand or when the application is idle. The metadata extraction happens on priority for all assets, thereby enabling the filter panel and search to become functional sooner. This change enables users to work with bulky folders without performance issues, like not-responding states. Now, users will have a fully updated filter panel before all the thumbnails/previews are generated, allowing them to search for files sooner.
Import from Device Option on Mac
On Mac OS 10.11.x, Bridge CC didn’t recognize iOS and Android mobile devices or digital cameras connected in PTP (PictureTransfer Protocol) or MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) mode. In this update, an alternative to import media from these devices is provided. Users can choose File > Import from Device to import media. This Mac-only feature launches Apple Image Capture to bring files from devices into Bridge.
Auto-Stack Panoramic and HDR Images
This update enables users to save time by automatically organizing sets of images into stacks for processing, such as high dynamic range (HDR) or panoramic composites in Photoshop CC.
Bridge CC 6.2 is now available with Creative Cloud. adobe.com