Yammer, you might visit this link in the Mac forum.  Similar problem?

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/952714?tstart=0

The silence is deafening.

Curt, your link is to a post in the thread i linked to above it. No big deal but that's what Yammer was talking about.

Yammer, I haven't been able to put my finder on the exact cause yet. My gut tells me it has something to do with Bridge not understanding XMP files written by older versions of Lightroom, but I can't confirm that.

The really frustrating thing is that if this error would generate a code that could be traced to a specific condition, we could at least identify the cause and figure out a work-around.

...Mike

haggest wrote:

 

I believe its a question of Win7 ownership and permissions. I believe that the for some reason the physical drive I moved from my old PC to my new PC retains "ownership and permissions", so Win7 notes all of the folders as read-only, and won't write the metadata to the jpegs in that folder.

 

You are correct.  Files made on another computer do not have the same permission levels as ones made on the same computer

Here is a solution from Pixel Basher

The key to solving this issue lies is understanding that in terms of Windows 7 Security, every internal or external hard drive, plus folders, sub-folders and files thereon has an OWNER. Also each OWNER has a certain level of PERMISSION to do things such as moving files to a different folder, deleting or re-naming them etc. If you try to do things that you don't currently have Permission to do, that is when you get an ‘Access Denied’ error message. Also your system has an Admistrator or Administrators and at the outset you need to ensure through the Control Panel that you are listed as one of them. .

If, like me, you didn't realise these things, (and why would you if Microsoft or your computer or hard drive suppliers couldn't be bothered to really make sure you knew about them), then trying to fathom the ‘Access Denied’ problem becomes a stressful and frustrating nightmare as I can testify having spent a week at it!

The steps that I took to resolve the issue and which I believe now constitute the 'Correct Answer' are as follows:

1. First make sure that you have Administrator rights on your system via the Control Panel
   
   
2. Next ‘right click’ on the Drive whose files you want to gain full access to, for example the drive that your pictures are stored on, and click on 'Properties'.
   
   
3. Under the Security tab you will see a list of Groups and Users on this drive and the Permissions that they have to do things.
   
   
4. Before doing anything to edit these Permissions, first click on the Advanced button. This opens another window with a tab showing the Owner of this drive.
    
   
5. Click on the Owner tab and if you are not already listed as the owner, make yourself the owner by selecting your name from the list. I believe it should appear there if you are an admistrator or user. (In my case at this stage the owner was initially shown as an obscure string of numbers and letters which I believe identified the drive when it was connected to the lap top I was using before I upgraded my machine)
   
   
6. Now be sure to check the box that says "Replace Owner on Subcontainers and Objects" and the click Apply. On completion of this step, the drive in question and all the folders, subfolders and files thereon should now be 'owned' by you. You could check this out by right clicking on a particular folder then clicking Properties > Security > Advanced > Owner. Your name should appear. So far so simples!
   
   
7. Now go back to the Security Tab for your drive (Step 2 / 3 above) and look at the Permissions you currently have. Your aim now is to allow yourself 'Full Control.' If you don’t currently have this level of permission click Edit, select your name on the list, check ‘Full Control’ and 'Apply' the change.
   
   
8. I think I'm right in saying that at this point whilst still working in the Drive directory you are now given the option of ticking boxes which allow you to, in effect, cascade the permission you have just granted yourself to all the files and folders on that drive. Tick the box to allow this and Windows should then take care of the rest.If I'm not quite correct here then in my particular case, for example, all my images were stored on my external drive. The top level, or 'parent' folder in which all my pictures could be found was the 'My Pictures' folder and I had created a number of folders and subfolders ('child ' folders) within that folder. The permissions I gave to the Parent folder – My Pictures – were cascaded down through the Child folders.
   
   
9. On completion of the above step I tested the result in Windows Explorer by dragging a few files back and forth between folders and it now worked perfectly - I was now able to move / delete / rename etc all files without now getting the dreaded access denied message. What a sense of relief! This meant that I could now open Bridge normally rather than having to right click it and 'Run As Admistrator' - albeit that is a very useful thing to do until you get the problem sorted as described.

It is not a bug.  It is how the OS system sets up permission levels in both Win and Mac. 

Curt Y wrote:

 

Yammer P wrote:

 

What I'd like to know is why an image refused to generate a thumbnail, until I renamed it outside Bridge.

Usually it is becasue there is some error in how the image file was constructed.  By saving it in another program whatever error was there, it was eliminated.  This is the same problem in a parallel thread http://forums.adobe.com/thread/925441?tstart=0 where OP can add metadata to files generated with his camera until he saves it in PS.

I'm reading through this thread again and noticed this.

You misinterpreted what I wrote. All I did was 'rename' the 'damaged' raw image (using Explorer). I did not open it in any application. Its binary contents were unaltered.

Bridge could not generate a thumbnail, even if the image's cache and XMP were removed, but it could generate a thumbnail for an EXACT copy of the image with a new filename (done outside Bridge). What does that tell you? It tells me that the filename/handle is tainted, and Bridge already has made assumptions about it (presumably a database entry using the filename as a key).

To me, this seems to be a similar behaviour to the metadata problem. Jingshu Li / Melissa was easily able to keyword a raw image+sidecar from my system when I could not - even when I copied them to several different locations on my computer. This suggests to me that the files themselves are not the problem, but my copy of Bridge had a problem with the files. I was able to use Camera Raw to update one minor develop setting, and the problem went away. I assume Bridge updated a database entry with this action, and corrected the previous problem.

@ Curt - Great work with the permissions issue.  Unfortunately, your approach has not resolved the issues for me.  My image assets live on a Linux based NAS and I use two different Windows 7 systems to access the files.  Both systems are experiencing the apparently related problem of not being able to assign a rating (or lable) or keywords on some apparently random files.  The most frustrating part is that the permissions on the two Windows boxes are identical but they each experience the error but on different files.  In other words, a file that generates a metadata error when adding a keyword on one system will not generate the error on the other system and vis-versa.  When I encounter an error on one system, I could use the other computer to make the required change.  After switching back to the main platform I am once again able to alter the asset metadata with the system that initially produced the error.

Initially I was using switching from one computer to the other and then back to do my work but the frequency of the metadata errors has been increasing to the point where switching is becoming unworkable and the issues Bridge (CS5) are impacting my productivity.

@ QE Team - Is a fix for this issue actually in development?

@ Anyone - Can anyone please suggest a reliable and relatively inexpensive alternative tool for browsing and sorting my assets?  And does this bug continue into CS6?

For browsing and sorting ACDSEE always ran rings around bridge.

As far as this metadata error, it's not fixed in CS6. I photograph as well as design. Photos don't usually have the problem. Designs do (for me). I may spend a day creating graphics and at the end assign the copyright etc. to all my work. But when I select a bunch it sometimes tells me it can't apply to all. Once it gets done applying the one(s) that it won't apply to can't be done even indivitually. Could be jpg, PNG or whatever. And yes, opening them and making a minor change and re-saving usually does the job. But it's a real PITA.