


Today’s Question: You mentioned the issue of Bridge color labels not showing up correctly in Lightroom Classic. Is there a way to fix those mismatched color labels?
Tim’s Quick Answer: You can easily update color labels in Lightroom Classic to resolve mismatches from Bridge by filtering images based on color label text and then assigning the intended color label.
More Detail: The default definitions for color labels are different in Adobe Bridge and Lightroom Classic, which means if you import photos into Lightroom Classic that previously had color labels assigned in Bridge, the color labels will appear white rather than with the intended color. That’s because the display of a color label is based on text in metadata, and the two applications used different text for the labels.
For example, in Bridge the default text for a red color label is “Select” while in Lightroom Classic it is “Red”. If you had assigned a red color label in Bridge and then imported the photo into Lightroom Classic, the color label will appear as white, indicating it is an unknown color.
Fortunately, it is easy to resolve this issue by filtering the images and assigning an updated color label.
For example, you could go to the All Photographs collection in the Catalog section of the left panel in the library module so you’re viewing all photos in your entire catalog. Then on the Library Filter bar start with “None” selected so no filter is set, and then go to the Metadata tab. Set one of the columns to represent color labels by clicking the header and selecting “Label” from the popup menu.
You can then set a filter based on the intended color label. For example, you could choose “Select” from the “Label” column to filter images that were assigned a red color label in Bridge. Then select all the photos (Edit > Select All) and assign the correct color label. In the grid view with the images selected you can press the number “6” on the keyboard, for example, to assign a red color label.
By filtering all images based on the color label definition from Bridge and then assigning the corresponding color label in Lightroom Classic, you’ll resolve those color label mismatches so no images display a white color label moving forward.