It Begins in Bridge

As we take more and more photographs or work with more and more images, we're going to need a way to quickly see them all as well as organize them before deciding which ones to open in Photoshop. I feel that it's far too tedious to actually use the file open dialog in Photoshop because I have to navigate and look at each image individually. I can't see more than one image at a time, and although I can scroll over and use one of these other ways to describe the images. You don't really see the necessary information that I like to see about each image.
Fortunately Photoshop comes with an incredibly powerful companion application called Adobe Bridge. And it's far easier to use Bridge to navigate the folders on your hard drive and open images. If you haven't already installed Bridge please see the introductory lessons of this course on how to install it. In order to quickly move to Bridge, I can use the File menu, and then Browse in Bridge, or use the keyboard shortcut Cmd-Opt-O on the Macintosh, Ctrl-Alt-O on Windows. This takes me immediately to Bridge. If Bridge hadn't already been running, it would also launch Bridge, and this is the default view.
Now Bridge is a visual media manager and it's going to help us to work with our images. You can see here with a path across the top that I'm in the desktop area. I also know that because right here in the Favorites area it's highlighted. If I want to see an additional folder structure I can click on the Folders tab... And then use the disclosure triangles in order to see the contents of different folders. When I click on the folder we can see the contents of that folder here in the content area, and if I select an image I get a larger preview over here in the preview area. If I select more than one image, we can see both of those images being previewed. If I want to open an image, I simply click on the single image, double click on it, and it opens it up in Photoshop.
Let's go ahead and close this image by choosing File and then Close, or on Mac, I can use Cmd + W, on Windows, Ctrl + W. And then, to quickly return to Bridge, we'll use that keyboard shortcut, Option + Cmnd + O. If I'm in Bridge and I want to move back to Photoshop the easiest way is to simply click the icon of the boomerang. That takes me directly back to Photoshop. Let's go back to Bridge for one moment because I just want to show you that you can also select an image or in fact I can hold down the Command key and select more than one image... And then I can click and drag these to any other folder. If i were to let go of the mouse rigth now Bridge would actually move the images on my operating system.
Now I don't want to do that so I'll go ahead an bring them into the context area and release the mouse. But you should just now that bridge isn't just for looking at images. You can also organize your assets and move not only your files, but also your folders. So, as you can see, Bridge is going to be much easier, and a much more efficient way, to navigate to different folders and view different images, and open them up in Photoshop.