Thursday, January 28, 2016

Bridge encounters a problem reading the cache -- solution - 1/28/2016

OK, so a fresh install of the program did NOT help. The problem with Bridge was beginning to appear systemic. It was occurring whether connected to the network through VPN, to an external hard drive on my desk or when trying to access a folder on my PC desktop.

Well, after some online research I think I might have found the solution: restore the program's factory settings. That is, reset the Preferences and purge the thumbnail cache.

According to Adobe you launch Bridge and IMMEDIATELY hold down the Command+Option+Shift (PC: Control+Alt+Shift) keys. A small dialogue box will appear:

Check the two boxes as shown and voila! You should be all set. A word of caution, though. This will, of course reset all your Preferences so you will have to tweak Bridge . and you'll have to reindex your image library, too. The word online is that this might happen with some frequency. We'll see.

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Bridge encounters a problem reading the cache

OK, so right off I want to emphasize that this is a BIG and I mean very big PROBLEM. Aside from Bridge's painfully slow search feature - however robust it might -- the potential for a corrupt cache is very real, particularly for the archivist who is a heavy Bridge user.

You launch Bridge and when normally the program opens and stabilizes you see it stall out as it "builds criteria" even though you've selected nothing. That means its trying to access the cache of the interface itself and having a damn hard time doing it.

Then you get the dreaded message: "Bridge encountered a problem reading the cache. Please purge the central cache."

Oh no.

That means all the indexing you've done has to be trashed and you need to start all over again. Which also means that you are unable to search your image library in the process. That's not good.

Well, this has happened to me a number of times over the years and it's never pretty. While you can't prevent this from happening you can anticipate that it will and work around it.

How?

Always have the image library indexed on at least two machines. That's what I do and if you're using Bridge to manage an image library you should, too.