Bridge Feature Request granted - by Microsoft!

Question

Quite some time back I postulated if Adobe produced a Bridge Reader, [like Acrobat Reader is to Acrobat] it would make many commercial photographer's lives and their client's much easier. And also encourage photographers to use Bridge[and now LR if dealing with just photos] rather than the rivals apps.
To illustrate - A few years back I had to give a client a month's worth of images to sort through [stills from a film]. He didn't own CS or Bridge or any sort of programme that would allow him to view RAW files. He was a producer, he employed people to do techie things, so I ended up having to render a month's worth of RAW files into JPEGs s that he could view them. Very, very time consuming + tedious. BTW This was after getting the Producer to download a trial version of PS Elements to allow him to use the Organiser part and his deciding that using/learning something that complicated [!] was too much effort. So several days rendering JPEGs had to be done. I now shoot RAW + JPEG!
Now, a free Bridge Reader would simply allow a non techie person to easily look at images supported by ACR, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver..etc just like he would in Explorer or Finder. Not only that the client would be able to annotate, easily sort and find images in order to rank images using flags and stars to indicate likes, dislikes etc and then send me a CD/DVD/BlueRay back with rankings I could then read in Bridge. Al you really need to have function wise is - sort, find and annotate, plus this would be a real kller - being able to burn the project to DVD [or multiple DVDs] with a single click.
The major benefit of a Bridge Reader would be that I could do basic corrections in ACR or LR first before sending the prooofs out, as simply looking at the undevolped RAW files is really not the best way for a client to realise how good the image can look if they are only half done.
Well Bridge 2 limps out and no Bridge Lite/Bridge Reader or any sign of something like it. Though a much improved GUI it has to be said. Way better then LR for initial sorting finding images in many ways.
But if you go here http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/download.aspx?key=reader you can get a Reader to view and to view, label, rate, and comment on distributed Expression Media catalogs [iViewMedia Pro, bought + renamed bt MS]. Looks like Microsoft are doing a surprisingly good job with the Expression line. The web design apps have also had good reviews and Microsoft of all companies may well fill the hole left by Macromedia's disappearence.

Answer 1

Tom,
If you know how to create File Info custom panels, you can also edit custom metadata using the Bridge metadata panel. To do this, you need to create a File Info custom panel and add to it the "fbname" attribute. Here is an example snippet from a custom panel definition file that uses the fbname attribute.
static_text(name: "Camera Model");
edit_text(fbname: "Camera Model", locked: true, xmp_namespace:
'http://ns.adobe.com/tiff/1.0/', xmp_path: "Model");
The value of the "fbname" attribute sets the label that will appear for the property in the metadata panel. The property will appear in a new section of the Metadata panel--the name of this section will match the name of the custom panel as it appears in File Info.
The fbname attribute is only supported by CS2. In CS1, the fbname attribute will be ignored, but the panels will still work as they would without the fbname attribute.
You can find out more about File Info custom panels here: http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp.
Thanks,
David Franzen
XMP/Bridge Quality Engineer
Adobe Systems, Inc.