Today’s Question: Please mention that the color labels of an image in Bridge do NOT correspond to the color labels in Lightroom Classic (dear Adobe: please fix this) and the color labels of an image in both images and folders are not visible outside of their respective software.
Tim’s Quick Answer: Actually, this issue can easily be fixed (mostly) by updating the color label definitions.
More Detail: The problem with color labels in software such as Bridge and Lightroom Classic is that they aren’t really color labels at all. I mean, they look like colors, but really they are simply represented by text in a metadata field, similar to keywords. The real problem that is the basis for today’s question (or request) is that Adobe used different default text for color labels in Bridge versus Lightroom Classic.
A red color label gets the word “Select” in Bridge, while it gets the word “Red” in Lightroom Classic. Similarly, yellow is “Second” in Bridge and “Yellow” in Lightroom Classic. As you may have realized, in Lightroom Classic the color label definitions are logical, and in Bridge they are unique to whatever Adobe employee defined them in the first place.
But you can change those definitions. If you had been using Bridge and switch to Lightroom Classic, you can change the color label definitions to the Bridge defaults by going to the Library module and choosing Metadata > Color Label Set > Bridge Default from the menu. Note, however, that if you change the definitions, any images with color labels that don’t match the definitions will appear as a white color label rather than the color you had actually assigned.
Similarly, you can change the color label definitions in Bridge. In the Preferences dialog go to the Labels and Ratings tab, where you can change the definitions for the color labels in the Label Options section. For example, you could update these to the names of the colors as used in Lightroom Classic.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that if you assign color labels in Bridge for photos that are already imported into your Lightroom Classic catalog, those color label updates won’t appear in your catalog. Rather, you’ll see a metadata mismatch. My recommendation, however, is to never update metadata outside of Lightroom Classic for photos that are being managed with a Lightroom Classic catalog.
Similarly, color labels assigned in Lightroom Classic will not appear in Bridge unless you have saved metadata out to the source images, in addition to having those updates saved in the catalog. This can be enabled by turning on the “Automatically write changes into XMP” checkbox on the Metadata tab of the Catalog Settings dialog, for example.
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