Work with the Adobe Bridge cache

Question

This question was posted in response to the following article: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/creativesuite/cs/using/WSfd1234e1c4b69f30ea53e41001031ab64-736 3a.html

Answer 1

jugenjury,
Here is a post in thead "Bridge Slow to load thumbs, building criteria", where Bridge constantly rebuilds thumbnails.  An interesting theory and seems to have some evidence to back it up.  Do you have Generate 100% Previews Checked?    J&K thinks this is problem in certain instances.
81. J&HK,  
  May 21, 2013 12:56 AM    in reply to SandraChung 
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Discovered today, 21 May 2013. HOPEFULLY, the ANSWER!!
Open BRIDGE
Select THUMBNAIL OPTIONS from the icon on the address bar at the right/top of the screen.
This should have HIGH QUALITY PREVIEWS checked.
Check GENERATE 100% PREVIEWS.
Immediately UNCHECK GENERATE 100% PREVIEWS
This should reset the registry key that causes BRIDGE to continuously reload 100% previews of thumbnails!
A further symptom that this is occurring is that once the folder has been re-cached by Bridge (before doing the above), all the image files in that folder will have 100% previews already (no "Loading 100%" when the spacebar has been pressed and a left-click on the image to load the 100% view), even though this switch is un-checked.).
It appears that something causes BRIDGE to set this flag in the registry (incorrectly), while showing the flag as not set in the visual user interface. Setting and un-setting the flag causes the registry key to be correctly re-initialised.
I have encountered this on two PCs running CS6. On my own PC, re-installing CS6 to fix the loss of the connection between BRIDGE and PHOTOSHOP also corrected the above problem, so it appears to be an intermittent fault when CS6 is installed. Sometimes the registry flag is initialised correctly, and sometimes it is not.
The other occurrence was on a friend's PC. That PC has also lost the connection between Bridge and Photoshop, so it could be that the registry "corruption" causes both problems. The continuously loading thumbnails (and displaying the message "Building Criteria ... " while Bridge does this) appear to be resolved by performing the above action (or by re-installing CS6). That PC's owner has now re-loaded a whole swag of his image folders in Bridge. Some have needed to re-cache the thumbnails. When this has been done once (relatively quick, now that Bridge is not re-building 100% previews), returning to that folder loads the Bridge database and thumbnails for that folder almost instantly.
On my own PC, opening a folder containing 900 image files (450 .DNG with original raw embedded + 450 large JPEGs, with user-applied metadata, takes less than 5 seconds). Changing this switch for an open folder immediately precipitates the long process of generating 100% previews for that folder. This is PAINFULLY slow! This operation can only be cancelled by re-setting the switch back to un-checked.
A study of two PCs doth not a representative sample make, I know; but it does seem to validate the theory.