Bridge CS4 with very large image archves

Question

I have just catalogued 420,000 images from 3TB of my photographic collection. For those interested, the master cache files became quite large and took about 9 days of continuous processing:
cache size: 140 gb
file count: 991,000
folder count: 3000
All cache files were also exported to the disk directories.
My primary intent was to use the exported cache files as a "quick" browsing mechanism with bridge. Of course, "quick" is a rather optimistic word, however is is very significantly faster than having bridge rebuild caches as needed.
I am now trying to decide if it is worth keeping the master bridge cache because of the limitations of the bridge implementation which is not very flexible as to where and when the master cache adds new temporary cache entries.
Any suggestions as to the value of keeping the master cache would be appreciated. I don't really need key word or other rating systems since I presently use a simple external data base for this type for image location.
I am also interested in knowing if the "500,000" entry cache limitation is real - or if more than 500,000 images can be stored in the master cache since I will be exceeding this image count next year.

Answer 1

I have a bridge 5 cache system with 600,000 images over 8 TB of networded disk.  I too use this to "speed up" the browsing process and rely primarily on key word processing to group images.  The metadata indexing is, for practical purposes, totally useless (it never ceases to amaze me about why Adobe things it useful for me to know how many images were taken with a lens focal length of 73mm - or some other equally useless statistic).  The only thing I can think of that is are serious missing keyword indexing feature is the ability to have a key word associated with a directory.  For example, I have shot many dozens of dance, theatre, music and sports productions - it would be much more useful to cataloge a directory that has the key words "Theatre" and "Romeo and Juliette" than attempt to key-word each individual image.   It is, of course, possible to work around the restrictions but that is very unclean and certainly less than desireable.   Key-wording a project (i.e. a directory) is a totally different kettle of fish than key-wording an image.  I also find the concept of the "collection" is very useful and well implemented.
I do maintain a complete cache build of my system.  It is spread over two master caches, one for the first 400,000 images and a second for the next 400,000 (I want to stay within the 500,000 cache size limit - it is probabley associated with the MYSQL component of Bridge and I think may have problems if you exceed the limit by a substantial amount.  With Bridge on CS3, when the limit was exceeded , the cache system self-distructed and I had to rebuild).
The only thing I can think of (and that seems to be part of Adobe's design) is that Bridge will rebuild the master cache for a working directory "for no apparent reason" such as when certain (unknown) changes are made to ACR,   Other automatic rebuilds have been reported by others however Adobe does not comment upon when or what casuses a rebuild.  Of course, this has serious impact upon getting work done - it is a bloody pain to have bridge suddenly process 1500 thumbs and preview extracts simply to keep the master cache completely and perfectly synchronized (in terms of image quality) with what might be displayed if you happen if you want to load a raw image into photoshop.  This strategy is IMHO completely out of step with how (at least I) use the browsing features of bridge.
It may be of concern that Adobe may, for design reasons, change the format of the directory cache files and you will have to completely rebuild all master and directory caches yet again - which is a real problem if you have many hundreds of thousands of images.  This happened when the cache system changed from CS3 to CS4 - and Adobe did not provide conversion programme to migrate the old to new format.  This significantly adds to the rebuild time since each raw image must be completely reprocessed.  My current rebuild of the master cache has taken over two elapsed weeks of contunuous running.
It would be nice if Adobe would allow some control over what is recorded in the master cache - for example, "do you wish meta data to be indexed".
(( as an aside, adobe does not comment upon why, when using Bridge to import images from a CF card, results in the building a .xmp file with nothing but meta data for each raw file.  I am at a loss to speculate what really useful thing results other than maybe speeding up the processing of the (IMHO useless) aspects of meta data ))
To answer your quiestion, I do think the master cache is worth keeping - and we can pray that Adobe puts more though process into why the master cache exists and who uses the present type of information indexed within the cache.