Add "Open with Adobe Bridge" to your right click options for Windows

Not sure how many people out there use Adobe Bridge, I never used to use it. Just seemed life fluff that I did not need to navigate my images when it was just as fast (or faster) and easier to navigate to them normally in Windows.

However I have developed a few new techniques lately for photoshop and I found Bridge makes it much easier, also they have added several new options to Bridge that you can ONLY use from within Bridge itself. The program has come a long long way since the last time I used it making it much better than Windows for browsing your pictures.

So here is the problem. Your already in the folder you want to view pictures with and now you want to use Bridge instead but when you open the bridge program you have to navigate all the way through your folder tree again to that location making it 2x the work and greatly reducing the chance that you will even go through the trouble of using bridge instead of explorer.

Now here is the solution: Add a right click shortcut command to your drop down list that will open a folder of images inside of Bridge for you with that folder already the focus point for Bridge.

This allows you to seamlessly use Explorer and Bridge together as one and really increased my productivity.

So here is how you can set this up and do it yourself.

__________________________________________________________

Disclaimer: This process involves editing your system registry, damage can be done to your system if you mess up in there so follow the directions closely and do a backup of the registry first.

Its really easy but don't blame me if you break something
__________________________________________________________


1. Run regedit.exe (search for its location from the search bar)

2. Navigate to "My Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell" and select "shell"

3. Edit > New > Key

4. Name it Open with Adobe Bridge (You can name it anything within reason this is going to be what shows up when you right click)

5. Make sure this new key is selected

6. Edit > New > Key (again)

7. Name it command

8. With this key selected, double-click on the (Default) value in the right hand pane.

9. For Value Data, put in the full path to where your Bridge executable is stored with quotation marks around it, followed by "%1" also with quotation marks; for example, on my machine (which has the default installation of Adobe CS4 Extended on Windows 7 64bit), I put:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Bridge CS4\Bridge.exe" "%1"

Example (may not be the same for you!)


10. Exit regedit.

Here is what it should all look like when you are done in regedit other than the location of bridge.exe if yours is different:



Now if you right click on any folder from Windows you will see this:


And of course all the images for that folder will automatically load up into Adobe Bridge when selected.

 

hot

thanks for the tip.