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How does Photoshop Lightroom differ from Adobe Bridge?
Adobe Bridge is an essential image tool for web, print and dynamic media designers, videographers, animators, scientists, fine artists, and
numerous other industries around the globe. It is literally the "bridge" between the applications in Adobe Creative Suite, enabling files to be quickly moved through
varied workflows. Professionals use Adobe Bridge to browse files and pass them through many applications-from Photoshop and Illustrator® to InDesign® and
Acrobat®, or to Flash® and Dreamweaver® or After Effects® and Adobe Premiere® Pro.
Because Adobe Bridge plays such a vital role for many different professions, it includes several features that are not specifically
targeted towards photographers. This complexity may be essential for the designer or post-production artist, but for photographers, Lightroom cuts to the core
without compromising power, flexibility or quality. Because it is being created with the input of working photographers (including commercial, portrait, wedding,
photojournalists, fine art and others), Lightroom targets the most important and time-critical tasks to make them as efficient as possible.
One of the fundamental differences between Adobe Bridge and Lightroom is the way they store information about images. Adobe Bridge is a file
browser, which navigates folders on a local drive and displays their contents. Photographers, however, often need access to files stored on removable media such as a DVD
or remote hard drive. While Adobe Bridge is incapable of displaying these offline files, Lightroom takes an extended view beyond the local disk-it can work with offline
files because it is database driven. Importing photographs into Lightroom is the method by which new images are added to its database. Photographic files do not
need to be moved or copied when they are imported-the Lightroom database keeps track of where the originals are located, whether they are on your local hard drive
or not.
The Lightroom database model also speeds the access to information, creating lighting-fast searches based on standard EXIF and IPTC metadata or simple keywords.
And just as your photographs don't need to be stored on your local hard drive, neither does your Lightroom data. Multiple database can be created, whether they
are for individual clients and projects, or for students and their corresponding assignments, and they can be located on a local or removable drive for portability
and security. Finally, the Lightroom database allows it to keep track of information such as virtual copies, collections of images, editing history and snapshots, and
slideshow, print and web templates-information that would be impossible to efficiently store otherwise.
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