Today’s Question: If you add color labels in Lightroom, will they show up in MacOS Finder? And vice versa?
Tim’s Quick Answer: No. The color labels available on MacOS are specific to the operating system, and MacOS doesn’t display the contents of the Label field in metadata where the color label is stored by Lightroom and other applications.
More Detail: While the concept of assigning color labels to files in MacOS is similar to the ability to assign color labels in other software such as Lightroom Classic, Adobe Bridge, and other applications, the two features are not related to each other.
The color labels you can assign in MacOS are an operating system feature, and the information is not stored directly in the files themselves. This is why, for example, if you synchronize files to the cloud that have MacOS color labels, those color labels won’t appear when the files are accessed from a different computer.
The color labels assigned by Lightroom Classic, Bridge, and other applications, use the Label field that is part of the XMP metadata standard. The implementation involves simply adding a word to the Label field, which some software applications will then translate to the display of a specific color for an image. Note, for example, that by default Lightroom Classic uses the word “Red” for a red color label, while Adobe Bridge uses the word “Select” for a red color label.
So, the MacOS color labels and XMP metadata labels are completely different metadata values implemented in completely different ways. Software such as Lightroom Classic does not support the MacOS color labels, and when you display metadata for images using MacOS the Label field (and therefore the color label value) is not displayed.
Assuming you are saving metadata to files for your images in Lightroom Classic, you could browse your color labels in Adobe Bridge or another application that supports that metadata. Just be sure not to make any changes to that metadata outside of Lightroom Classic, because doing so will cause a metadata mismatch.
