This discussion applies to Windows machines in particular. We welcome your comments on whether the same problem occurs on Macs.

In Summary

Installing Photoshop CC 2014 on a Windows machine may have unpleasant side effects and one of those side effects is being forced to use ONLY Photoshop CC 2014 from Adobe Bridge.

The Details

Adobe Bridge is a rather powerful tool. In fact, we recommend it when using the Advanced Stacker PLUS. However during a live webinar recently Bridge stymied us.

Despite the release of many CC 2014 versions, there is currently no Adobe Bridge CC 2014 – the latest available is CC. Within Adobe Bridge CC a double click of a JPG or RAW file opens the file clicked in the most recently installed version of Photoshop EXCEPT if there is already a version of Photoshop running. If, for example you have Photoshop CS5 running and the most recent install is CC, then a double click would open the file in CS5 rather than CC. Adobe Bridge default file open still behaves the same way even after upgrading to Photoshop CC 2014. However other parts of Adobe Bridge do not behave the same.

The Tools -> Photoshop -> Batch operation previously worked just as described. No matter what the default version of Photoshop, using the Tools -> option would kick the currently running Photoshop and elicit Photoshop’s Batch menu. UNFORTUNATELY, The “Tools -> Photoshop -> Batch” operation does NOT work the same way once you install Photoshop 2014 CC.  With Photoshop CC 2014 installed, Tools -> Photoshop -> Batch will ONLY open Photoshop CC 2014. If you have another version of Photoshop already running, the Tools operation effort silently fails.

You can determine what version of Photoshop will be invoked by the Bridge -> Tools menu by selecting a file and doing  a “right click” and inspecting what is listed in the Open With list.

 

Also particularly unpleasant is the fact that only ONE of the Photoshop CS versions is listed as a choice in the Open With dialog even though on our windows machine we have 4 versions of Photoshop installed (CS5, CS6, CC and CC 2014). We’d love it if we could choose which Photoshop to open, but Photoshop CC 2014 confuses Windows into thinking that ALL versions of Photoshop are CS 2014. Normally in the the windows file browser you can right-click a file and “choose a default” program to open it.

Here we’ve chosen to associate a default to a PNG file.

The next step is to navigate to the program we want to open with by default… Here we will select the Photoshop CS5 folder, and next the photoshop.exe

After selecting photoshop.exe in the CS5 directory, we are disappointed to see the result look like this:

To Change Associations For Different File Types

While Photoshop does continue to make useful improvements, not all of those improvements are as easy to navigate. If you would prefer that Adobe Bridge open a different default version of Photoshop you can change the file associations within Adobe Bridge as shown. (Select Edit -> Preferences or Ctl-K).