Dumb Question about Bridge.....

[muddygirl]

I have finally got to the point that i have bought so much stuff I cant remember whats there now and I have given in and started tagging stuff with keywords in bridge.

My dumb question is.... How do I search by keyword to find what I want??

I have been through all the menus and buttons and options and I know there must be something simple that I'm missing. Can someone ( Heather?? ) Steer me in the right direction?

[muddygirl]

Ok, so I have worked out that you can select the keyword, right click and select find, but I must be doing something else wrong.
I have a main folder set up called " digital scrapbooking". Inside this I have sub folders for "kits", "elements", "papers", "fastners" etc, etc. The elements folder has further sub folders eg tags, flowers, butterflys etc.
Once everything is tagged I was assuming that i could select the main "digital scrapbooking" folder and do a keyword search for say "flower" and get everything from within "kits" "elements" etc that I had tagged as a flower. I have tried this but it doesn't seem to work. It returns nil results. I'm sure that its only something simple that i'm doing wrong, but i don't know what it is.

Any ideas?

[maureenreynolds]

Control (or command) F, and then define the paramaters when that screen comes up.

[hguenthe]

Sam, it sounds to me that you need to do one of 2 things and you should be getting the results you are looking for. Bridge hasn't seen all your files yet to have pulled the keywords from their metadata so that information isn't cached yet for it to search. It is kind of like you asking it to find something it has never seen. It has to first know what it is looking for to know where it has been placed.

The easiest is probably to make sure on your search pop up that under your Source, Criteria in the Results section make sure that "Included Non-Indexed Files (may be slow)". This will then have Bridge search through all of your files under your source directory and pull up everything with that keyword.

The second way and the best way to have Bridge build the cache for future use so that you don't always have to have that first option checked (as it does take longer as it researches all the files each time), is to build your cache & previews. By building the previews and cache, you are saving yourself future searching time. However, the first option is the best option for making sure no file is missed in your cache.

To do this one, you go to your folder (digital scrapbooking) and then select from the top options Tools -> Build & Export Cache -> Build 100% Previews. Let that run and it will scan your files and grab the metadata.

A caution about this method is that I find that if you have a lot of files, it sometimes will crash building the previews after a couple of thousand items. Your work isn't lost, you just need to reopen and continue, it will pick up where it dropped off. For this reason, if I am wanting it to build a cache for a huge number of new items, instead of going to the main folder, digital scrapbooking, I would go one level lower to the sub folders and do this for each one. ex) do it for the kits, then for the elements, etc

Once you have done the initial full caching of your items, each time you do the Build Previews, it will go much faster as it is only adding what it hasn't seen before, not having to generate all the previews for everything again.

Hope that makes sense and fixes your problem.

[muddygirl]

Thanks so much Heather, I knew you would be able to help. I'll give it a go today.
Cheers.

[THAT-GIRL]

Sam also while you building your keywords... be aware of some mistakes that many people made (including me) and then they think they lost all keywords... I found that question asked on Adobe forum... I had to read it couple of times even print it, till it sinked to me, but it really helps to understand HOW the RIGHT WAY to do it...
Adobe Forums: CS4 Bridge short term memory "keyword...
and here is another one very smart question and answer...
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/484533?tstart=0

[cheska99]

Thanks for this discussion, girls. Bridge seems to be the least well documented of all the Adobe products I've seen and it can be persistently confusing, I find, although definitely an extremely useful program. Heather, your description of the two separate processes is very clear and extremely helpful and is apparently not something that any one on the Adobe forums has said yet--or not that I could find anyway.