culling and sorting

[Nasturtium]

right now I'm looking at Bridge and Lightroom for culling, sorting and filing my images.

Who has already been down this road and can give me some pointers?

I have a fairly solid filing system by date (raid and external drive) for originals but with all the various edits for web/print/derivative art it's getting a bit out of hand.

I like the way I can sort a collection in Bridge and I like the printing options in Lightroom (and batch processing)

[andrewrodney]

I do all this in Lightroom but it should be similar in Bridge except how it deals with high quality previews is questionable (I build either Standard or 1:1 previews on import into LR because I want to see critical focus for determining if a shot is going to get trashed or not). Then I just use the X key for rejects and if I see a shot that I really like initially, I hit the P key to make it a Pick. Everything else is kind of a neutral setting (don’t hate it, don’t love it). Trash all the X (Command/Control Delete), convert to DNG and batch rename so they are all in order. From there, keeping track is done primarily with smart collections based on metadata (keywords). I don’t like “dumb collections” because they are all saved in the proprietary database which is fine unless you decide to move to another DAM or system. At least a Smart Collection can be replicated with any decent product that builds such collections based on actual metadata.

[RooB]

I'd recommend ACDSee.

http://www.acdsee.com

Adobe Bridge is like a baby compared to ACDSee.