Today’s Question: I’ve started using your approach of adding a red color label on import to mark images for review. I hadn’t previously made much use of color labels, but now that I’ve started, I have found some images with a white label. How does that happen when it isn’t possible to add a white color label to a photo?
Tim’s Quick Answer: A white color label indicates a label that doesn’t match the current definitions. For example, if you assigned a color label in Adobe Bridge and then imported the image into Lightroom Classic, the definitions of color labels won’t match and so the label will appear as white.
More Detail: Despite their name, when it comes to the metadata that gets added to an image, a color label isn’t really a color at all. Rather, the Label field simply contains text, which software such as Bridge or Lightroom Classic interpret and display as a particular color.
Different software will implement color labels differently, and in fact Adobe hasn’t even been consistent with the definitions for color labels in different applications, such as Bridge and Lightroom Classic. When there’s a mismatch in the metadata value and the current definitions, a white color label is displayed.
In Bridge, for example, the default value for a red color label is “Select” and the default value for a yellow color label is “Second”. In Lightroom Classic the names of the colors are used in metadata, such as “Red” and “Yellow”.
So, if you assign a red color label in Bridge, the word “Select” will be added to the Label field. But when you import that image into Lightroom Classic the color label definitions don’t include “Select”, and so the mismatch is reflected by displaying the color label as white.
While you can change the definitions of color labels to compensate for mismatches if they have been consistent in your previous workflow, my recommendation is to instead update the color label for any images that show a white color label to reflect the actual color label that was originally intended.
