Edit Color Labels in Adobe Lightroom

Intro

In Lightroom classic you might be familiar with using color labels with individual photos, but did you know you can use color labels for folders in Lightroom as well?

Are you like me sometimes where you take a bunch of pictures, you go in and edit some. You leave some unfinished, then go off, take more pictures and do it again.

Now you have folders that have some potential good photos but after a while you don’t know where they might be anymore.

It would be easier if there was a visual cue to let you know where you left off even if you had to work on other things for a while and wanted to get back into things.

There is.

Just like when you set a color label for an individual image, you can add a color label to a folder and a collection.

You can also add names to them to keep your workflow consistent.

Steps to take

If you right click on a folder you can see an option to Add color label to folder.

The default is just to tell you the color of the label.

Let's customize it.

Go up to the Metadata menu

Click on Color Label Set

You will see some default options.

screenshot of lightroom classic under metadata menu

But if you go to Edit you can make your own.

Pop up window from Lightroon to edit color labels

In this window you have the option to edit the color labels for Images, Folders and Collections.

We are going to focus on Folders right now.

The Color Label I Use

Red - Imported

I just brought them in, added metadata, tags, but that's it

Yellow - Rated

I have looked through them. I made my selections on which ones I want to work on.

Green - In Progress

I have made some edits, but still working on others.

Blue - Edited

Done with the processing, and I need to export them.

Purple - Published

I have completed the full process in this folder. The selected images have been exported and those are somewhere, either on social media, printed, sent off to other people.