A new panel called Mini Bridge can help your workflow in InDesign^R CS5. I use InDesign to layout each issue of Mused, BellaOnline's Literary Magazine. As you would expect, I not only import all the artwork but all the head shots for the contributors. Each person who has a submission featured in Mused, has a short bio and photo in the Contributors section. That comes to 80 or 90 head shots and 40 or more pieces of art. As you can imagine, anything that can make the import process easier or faster will make my work easier and faster. That's exactly what the Mini Bridge does in InDesign.

The first thing that you will like about the new Mini Bridge is that you don't need to wait for an external program to open. My computer isn't super charged and I really don't have the time to wait for Adobe Bridge to open. Besides, I don't need to have access to all my images. Most of the time, I only need access to the images associated or linked to the project at hand.

Let's take a look at the Mini Bridge. At the top we have the usual navigation buttons and Path Bar. In the Path Bar, you can quickly navigate through a folder and its subfolders to the images that you need. For those of you who like to navigate through folders with the familiar tree structure, there is a Navigation pane. But if you have images from several folders linked to your project, Mini Bridge has a nice feature that will collect them all together for you. Right-click on an .indd thumbnail for your project and use Show Linked Files from the menu. Mini Bridge will create a temporary collection of all the images linked to that project and display their thumbnails in the Content pane. Each thumbnail that is associated with the project has a Link icon at the upper right corner.

Once displayed in the Content pane, a selected thumbnail will display in the Preview pane. You can drag and drop the images into your layout, thus bypassing the old File – Place procedure. Of course, this not only works for images. You can access all of the assets for your project through Mini Bridge.

*Adobe provided a review copy to me free of charge.

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