According to Adobe Systems Incorporated, Adobe Bridge is “a powerful, easy-to-use media manager for visual people, letting you easily organize, browse, locate and view creative assets.” Adobe Bridge is primarily for visual designers, photographers and other people who deal with a large number of digital visual files.
- Adobe markets its Bridge program primarily as part of its Creative Suite, which contains a number of design programs such as InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and Flash. Its name comes from the fact that it is meant to be a “bridge” linking these and other programs.
- Adobe Bridge is not available as a standalone program. It comes either as part of Adobe Creative Suite or as an adjunct to the Adobe Photoshop program.
- The basic function of Adobe Bridge is to allow users to index, organize and easily search their images. The organizational interface is customizable.
- Adobe intends Bridge to be a program that streamlines and facilitates project management in a group environment. It works with Adobe Version Cue and Adobe Device Central to help various members of a team to easily access and manipulate communal assets and projects.
- Apple’s iPhoto program performs tasks similar to Adobe Bridge. However, iPhoto is designed to appeal to less tech-savvy users. Adobe Bridge has extensive manual functions that give the user lots of options, while iPhoto is more automated, allowing users to do as much as possible with very little expertise.