Is simple folder browsing software like Adobe Bridge all you need for organizing your photos?

In this article I want to explain the difference between what I’ll call ‘image browsers’ and ‘image cataloguers’. Image cataloguing tools like Adobe Lightroom import your photos into a database and offer very sophisticated, very adaptable organizing and search options. But they bring their own limitations and complications. What’s the alternative?

Anyone who’s spent any time with Photoshop should be familiar with Adobe Bridge. This is the perfect example of an ‘image browser’. It displays the folders and subfolders on your computer or external drives and the pictures within them as thumbnail images. It’s as simple as that.

Perhaps the best way to think of this is as ‘real’ versus ‘virtual’ imagine organization.

An image browser shows the real location of your photos in real folders and sub-folders, updated in real time if any changes are made in this program or any other.

There are three key advantages to basic image browsers like Adobe Bridge:

1. There’s no import process. You don’t have to add folders and photos to some centralized library. It just shows you what’s there.
2. You don’t have to update or synchronise your folders in any way. If you add or move photos in other software or in Windows Explorer or Mac OS, they’ll simply show up in their new locations.
3. Similarly, if you edit an image in some other software, an image browser will show you the edited version. There are no conflicts, and no synchronization or updating is needed.

I know a lot of photographers who use Adobe Bridge rather than Lightroom. It really all depends on how you like to organize your images and how you locate them later. Image browsers like Adobe Bridge are especially effective for photographers with a clear start and end point to their photo projects. They do a job, do any editing and organizing needed, and then move on to the next job.

A folder-based photo organizing system is very robust. If you organize your photos using Adobe Bridge, the organization – the folders and sub-folders you’ve used – will be intact in other programs, such as the Library view in DxO PhotoLab, Capture One Sessions, the Browse mode in ON1 Photo RAW, Windows Explorer and macOS.

But image browsing software has limitations.

1. Without a centralized image database, searching your photo archive for specific images becomes slow or impractical. You might want to search for ‘male portraits’, for example, which might be scattered across a hundred different folders. Image cataloguing software is built for this, image browsing software is not.
2. You can’t bring together images stored in different folders. For this you need ‘albums/collections’, which are like virtual containers for images stored in different locations. You might want to curate a set of career-based images for an exhibition or theme-based portfolios.
3. Some image browsers do offer album/collection/search tools, but only by employing a kind of ‘stealth cataloguing’. There’s nothing sinister about it, but it does introduce a software-specific organization system which you were probably trying to avoid. Folders created in Capture One will be visible as folders in Lightroom or Adobe Bridge, but Albums will not.

By contrast, an image cataloguer stores your images in a database that represents what they look like with thumbnail images and previews, together with their folder location, and adds ‘virtual’ organizing tools like albums, searches, flags, color labels and more.

It’s a much more powerful approach but is software-specific – this ‘virtual’ organization system exists only within that software and its image catalog. Also program like Lightroom may appear to show you the contents of actual folders, but it’s going by the information in its database, now what’s actually there.

Software for folder-based image organization

So if after all this you decide you do want to employ a simple folder-based filing system, then what are your choices? This isn’t an exclusive list but covers many popular and better-known applications.

Adobe Bridge is very effective and freely available to anyone using Adobe’s Photography Plan, for example. It does offer a simple Collection system that’s OK for occasional use, but Bridge quickly gets bogged down if you try to apply searches over multiple folders.

Lightroom Classic does need to import images first, but after that you can, if you choose, do all your organizing via folders and ignore Collections completely. You do need to make any changes to image names or locations within Lightroom, though, because it will lose track of images you move externally and you will have to relocate them.

Lightroom (CC) is another potential candidate because it now offers a Folder view for image folders on your computer. It doesn’t have quite the same tools as Adobe Bridge when it’s used this way, though, and if you do want to do any more serious organizing you will still have to move photos to the cloud.

Capture One Sessions are an excellent alternative to its Catalogs. Sessions are designed for studio/professional photographers with a linear shoot-edit-share client workflow. Sessions work like Adobe Bridge with ‘live’ folder organization, but with more organizing options.

ON1 Photo RAW has a Browse mode where you can view folders and their contents ‘live’ with no need to import them into a catalog. There’s also a Catalog option where you can add key folders for more advanced searches.

DxO PhotoLab has a Library panel displays a live folder view. You can also create Projects (albums) in a separate panel – but this is another example where image browsers start to cross over with cataloguing tools. It’s easy to slip accidentally into a software-specific system.

What is ‘software specific’ or ‘virtual’ organizing?

This is where image organizing software starts to use its own ‘virtual’ organizing tools, like albums, color labels, flags and other tools that will not be visible outside that application. Many folder based browsing tools do this, and it’s done with the best of intentions to offer more options and control for users – but you lose much of the transparency and robustness of a folder-based system.

Beware also of non-destructive editing. You can use the ‘Open in Camera Raw’ option in Adobe Bridge, for example, to apply non-destructive adjustments to a photo – but while that photo in that folder will still be visible to other programs, your non-destructive edits will only be visible in Bridge (or Lightroom, if you import that folder).

So if you are convinced by the simplicity and robustness of a folder-based organizing system and you can make it work for you, then go for it. Just be aware that you can still get drawn into software-specific tools and options in all of these folder browsing tools that can undermine this simple plan!