•
Sidecar files most be visible so their respective software may
recognise them. I know that C1 keeps everything tidy in an own
folder but I don't understand why Bridge should browse through
these.
— Why do you need Bridge, Graham?
Bridge seems to browse everything, even though from what I have read, but can't get to work, it shouldn't. Its even generating previews of the C1 previews that are embedded in the C1 sidecar files - which is most annoying.
And why do need Bridge? Well, I'm not sure I do now
I sometimes want to quickly browse through all my photographs, I only have 25,000 or so to browse through. But...
C1 takes too long to open, which isn't a problem if I am actually going to do some editing, but it turns a "quick look" into a bit of a pain. And even though once its open everything works reasonably well. Its still a bit slow at searching compared to other options I have.
Lightroom opens quicker, searches quickly, but the rendering of previews is so slow that its a pain "after" its open.
Media Pro opens quickly, browses through thumbnails "incredibly quickly" and previews open instantaneously. But any meta data (via XMP files) changes you make inside or outside of Media Pro needs a manual sync, and you need to keep track of where you made those changes so you know what needs synched.
Neofinder, is fast to open and search, but rendering of previews is very slow.
Photo supreme, I also found too slow.
Photo Mechanic is very fast at everything, but only at a folder level. If you want to do anything with an entire collection of photographs you need to load every folder into Photo mechanic, which means it takes a long long time before you can do anything.
Bridge, which is something I had pretty well ignored until the other day, had impressed me with the speed it did things, and it seemed to offer a no extra cost solution that I should give a try, since it was sat there on my computer.
But now that I have actually indexed my files with Bridge, and built the previews, it actually takes longer to launch than C1 does :-( It rebuilds file information every time it launches, so it can put together filter option check boxes, with counts of the number of files that match the filter criterion.
Probably not helped as I can't get it to ignore irrelevant files, so its working with a 65,000 file data base rather than a 25,000 file data base. It still works very well if you work at a lower level, e.g all files from a particular year, but its turned out be rather worse at what I wanted to do than C1 is. But things like filters and searches are still very fast compared to C1, even with the entire photo collection loaded.
I am also put off by enormous size of the preview and indexing cache, I had to move it off my SSD and onto an external USB3 drive, when I realised it was approaching 60GB, and it seemed to less than half way through my files.
Unfortunately, using Media Pro since days it was iView media, really spoils you for anything that isn't a proper DAM, and although its still very strong in its core functions, it is also showing its age.
Photo Mechanic 6 has now been promised by the end of the year, and as a fan of PM I am hoping that with a DAM added to the existing PM features it will be what I am looking for. Meanwhile I am still struggling to find something that works for me.
So using Bridge looks like its just another one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time :-(