Bridge Out

Placed here as a public service to my fellow photographers who may find themselves contemplating violence against their computers. As always, do this at your own risk. Don't come crying to me if you fry your computer.

Problem: Adobe Bridge CS3 slows to a crawl, will not build thumbnails, locks up, smells funny.

Solution 1: Trash preferences. Start Bridge, before splash screen hit Ctl-Alt-Shift. This will give you a dialog box to set Bridge back to it's original state. This serves to make you take a lot of time re-customizing your workspace. If you do it several times it will increase your frustration level which I hear is similar to a good cardio workout.

Solution 2:
If 1 doesn't fix the problem (it didn't for me) check your cache folder. If you can get Bridge to open, click Edit > Preferences > Cache then click the "Choose" button to find your cache folder. Go to that folder and check the file size of #.err where # is the name of your computer. If it is not 0 bytes then you probably need to delete your cache folder. Open the file in a text editor like notepad. This is how I found my problem. Every error line referred to the inability to access filesystem_blobs.myi. This file corresponds to filesystem_blobs.myd, which appears to be the actual cache of information. Both of these files were found in the "bridgestore" folder. I found that my filesystem_blobs.myd file was 8.47 GB. Way too big. Even if it wasn't corrupt it would have taken forever to load so it was time for a new one.

I renamed my cache folder to test my fix. Sure enough, Bridge started a new cache folder and everything is working like new. I went back and reclaimed my 8.47 GB of hard drive space by deleting the old folder. You will lose some information like keywords and any stored thumbnails when you do this but your pictures will be safe.

Thanks to Josh Johnston for helping me find the solution to this problem.