more than five color labels?

[PhilBurton]

Lightroom Version Number

Classic 10.2

Operating System

1. Windows 10

TimGrey suggests that it is possible for "software" to support more than five color labels. More than Five Color Labels – Ask Tim Grey However, this post is short on specifics for Lightroom Classic (or Photoshop, etc). An email to Tim Grey has not been answered, and I was wondering if anyone knows Lightroom's internals to suggest a solution, or at least some ways to experiment.

Phil Burton

 

[clee01l]

TimGrey suggests that it is possible for "software" to support more than five color labels. More than Five Color Labels – Ask Tim Grey However, this post is short on specifics for Lightroom Classic (or Photoshop, etc). An email to Tim Grey has not been answered, and I was wondering if anyone knows Lightroom's internals to suggest a solution, or at least some ways to experiment.

Phil Burton

More specifically the title of the article is wrong. It should read “More than five LABELS”. The label field is a standard metadata field. Lightroom has a Default Color Label Set defined that assigns the 5 standard colors to defined label values. A sixth color (white) (Custom) is assigned to any label value not in the Active Color Label Set. A seventh color (gray) is assigned to any label field that is undefined (empty)

The Default Color Label Set assigns the red Color to the Label value “red” and so on all the way to purple.

There is another color label set that assigned these same 5 colors to the Label values that Bridge uses.
You can define you own five label values to colors and create your own label set. I have one that assigns colors to the label designating the status of my images at a glance. For example in my Color Label Set, the color Purple (the only one not assigned by a Hotkey) assigns the label “To Be Worked” to an image. I add this automatically on import and change color labels assigning different labels to my images as they are being worked (A red color indicates “Complete and in a Published Service”.

Lightroom only gives you 5 colors and white and gray. And you can only have one Color Label Set active at a time. Any labels not matching the current color label set will get the white indicator in the Filter bar.


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[johnbeardy]

More specifically the title of the article is wrong. It should read “More than five LABELS”.

I might have called it "Use the Color Label Set feature to Thoroughly Confuse Yourself". Sure, in theory it might be handy to use Label Sets so you can put a greater variety of text into the label field and then see these as thumbnail colours. But in practice, smart people find it confusing. If you need to record extra text somewhere, find another field (eg job, headline).

Legacy compatibility makes this area difficult, but in my view Adobe made thumbnail colours overcomplicated by allowing text to be changed. It would have been better to have more colours and/or a second colour label which would enable Red Green, for example. But that ship sailed long ago.

 

[clee01l]

I might have called it "Use the Color Label Set feature to Thoroughly Confuse Yourself". Sure, in theory it might be handy to use Label Sets so you can put a greater variety of text into the label field and then see these as thumbnail colours. But in practice, smart people find it confusing. If you need to record extra text somewhere, find another field (eg job, headline).

IMO it was a mistake on Adobe's part to assign color to specific label text. But that mistake was made long before Lightroom in Bridge. The Label field the used intelligently has value much as the rarely used and rarely seen "job" & "headline".
Since they are assigning color borders to images, this could have been handled in the metadata in the catalog, not a defined field in the file header. But since this was being done first in Bridge, there was no catalog data base as everything managed in Bridge relied on the information being stored with the image file in the header. Another dumb move on Adobels part when developing Lightroom was to create a new Color label set where the label value "red" was assigned to the red color etc. The labels assigned in the Bridge default label set are at least meaningful but why assign hot keys to 4 of the 5 labels and label colors?

 

[johnbeardy]

We're on roughly the same page. I feel that in LR red should simply mean red, and I can keep in my head whatever red and other colours may signify for me. The trouble though goes back a long way, to when the IPTC was interested in the Urgency field and software developers crossed it with colour labels to produce an awkward hybrid that's too useful to ignore.

 

[PhilBurton]

Summing up the meaning of these replies, it sure sounds like Tim Grey should not have put out his More than Five Color Labels posting. So the takeaway for me is to do nothing here.

Thanks,

Phil Burton

 

[johnbeardy]

Or just dialled down the hype? In theory it's a good thing, but in practice, really?

I still like my old » Panel end markers idea.