Forcing Thumbnails to Rebuild in Bridge CS4
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If you’ve read this, then you already know that I’m a big fan of Adobe Bridge CS4. It has become my default workflow tool, and is now where I begin all of my post-production work. Like any piece of software, Bridge isn’t perfect, and there are some features I’d love to see in Bridge CS5, such as a histogram display within Bridge, the ability to export Collections and Smart Collections. And, like any piece of software, Bridge also has some bugs. One of the ones that bites me from time to time is Bridge’s occasional refusal to render thumbnails for some raw files. I haven’t found any official workaround for this bug (and maybe I’m the only one who’s having it, though I have experienced it on several different machines) but there is a quick and easy fix for the problem. |
When it happened to me the other day, I thought it was simply because I didn’t have the latest version of Camera Raw. I had been shooting with a Rebel T1i, and some of those thumbnails weren’t showing in Bridge. Instead I was simply getting a generic raw icon. The weird thing was that other raw files from the same shoot were displaying properly. I double-checked and, sure enough, I had the latest Camera Raw.
Under the View menu, Bridge offers a Refresh command, which is supposed to refresh the Contents panel, but I’ve never gotten this to rebuild thumbnails. However, if you’re a raw shooter, you know that, when you edit an image in Camera Raw, Bridge updates Bridge’s thumbnails when you exit the Camera Raw dialog box (which is when Camera Raw writes out your new Camera Raw conversion parameters). Camera Raw, then, is the key to rebuilding thumbnails.
If you’ve got a group of raw thumbnails that aren’t displaying in Bridge (and you know that you have installed a version of Camera Raw that supports your camera) then do the following:
1. Select all of the problem images in Bridge.
2. Double-click to open them in Camera Raw. If it’s an especially large number of files, Bridge might prompt you to confirm that you really do want to open them all.
3. Once in Camera Raw, the multiple images will appear in a filmstrip down the side of the Camera Raw dialog box. Click the Select All button to select them all.
4. Click the Synchronize button. This brings up a dialog box that allows you to select which edits you want to synchronize across all of the open raw files. By default, almost all of these edits are selected. Make sure Exposure is checked, then click Okay. When synchronized, any edit that you make to one of the synchronized files will be applied to all of them.
5. Make a tiny Exposure adjustment. I usually increase exposure by .01 stops. This will have very little effect on your image, but it’s an edit, so Bridge will be forced to update its thumbnails.
6. Click the Done button in Camera Raw. This saves your edits without opening the raw file in Photoshop, or saving out a converted version.
7. Click back into Bridge. You should see your thumbnails begin to update.
If you decide that you want to work with any of the images you’ve just altered, you can always undo the tiny exposure adjustment you made earlier, so the Exposure tweak shouldn’t prove to be too intrusive.
Bridge offers tools for purging your thumbnail cache, which will force a rebuild, but this will affect every thumbnail you see in Bridge, and result in lengthy waits while Bridge rebuilds thumbnails of every folder you venture into.
Comments
One Comment on Forcing Thumbnails to Rebuild in Bridge CS4
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Ozgur Kalan on
Sat, 11th Jul 2009 2:11 pm
Have you tried cache purge for the folder?
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