Today’s Question: During your presentation hosted by B&H Photo you demonstrated how you assign a red color label to folders that contain photos you still need to review. I was wondering if you use any other color labels for folders for different purposes in your workflow.
Tim’s Quick Answer: The primary color label I use for folders is the red label, which signifies a folder containing photos I still need to review. When I’m working on a project related to a particular folder or collection, I will sometimes use other colors to indicate the status in the context of the project.
More Detail: I assign a red color label to new photos being imported into my Lightroom Classic catalog to identify the photos I’ve not yet reviewed to decide if they are favorites or outtakes. To help ensure I don’t forget that a given folder contains such photos, I assign a red color label to the folder once I’ve imported new photos into a folder. You can assign a color label to a folder (or collection) in Lightroom Classic by right-clicking and choosing “Add Color Label to Folder” (or Collection) followed by the desired color.
As noted above, I use a red color label for a folder that contains photos I still need to review. When I’m working on a project involving particular photos I will often use a yellow color label to indicate that the project is in progress, and then a green color label to indicate it is completed. These color label assignments are a little more ambiguous, because I don’t often find that I need additional color labels for this purpose.
I do encourage photographers to consider how they might be able to improve their workflow by assigning color labels to folders or collections. If you find that you want to mark the status of a folder or collection or have something of a visual reminder that some work needs to be done within that folder or collection, the color labels can be very helpful.
I’m sure some photographers could find reasons to use perhaps all (or most) of the five color label options for folders and collections in Lightroom Classic. If so, you can come up with definitions for each color label to use for those purposes, so you’ll have a consistent approach to incorporating this helpful feature in your workflow.
