What do you use your color labels for?

[Shutter Bug]

Hi,
I'm moving from another DAM so I'm having to revamp some of my metadata structure with the biggest change being in how I use star ratings and color labels. My old tool had 9 colors instead of 5 and it was easier to apply color labels vs star ratings so I used color labels to do my rating and some "actions" (like ones to print or upload) and didn't use star ratings at all. Since I now only have 5 color labels, I need to use the star ratings to cover everything. I was able to use some of PSU's functionality to do some of the things I previously did with colors like use the print tag under versions so I have some colors available to use.

So my curiosity is ... what kinds of things are y'all using color labels for? I'm looking for ideas because I'm a big believer in learning from other people instead of reinventing the wheel. I keep coming up with ideas but end up with ones that could be two colors at once. For example, if I used one color for things to print and another color for things to "publish" ... you could want to both print and publish one photo so that wouldn't work since you can only have one color label applied at a time.

I'd rather use the color labels for ratings since it's more visual so it's easier to see which ones are your good ones, but then it seems weird to make "2 star" mean "to print" or some other function not relating to it's quality.

Anyway, I'd love to hear how y'all are using color labels.

Thanks

[Shutter Bug]

I meant to also ask this question in the same post, sorry ...

I'm also curious how y'all handle this... You rate a photo a 4 stars and then you edit it (adjustments, color correction, etc.) and name the edited version with an -e1 appended to the filename. Do you leave the original version with 4 stars still or do you remove the stars?

I can argue it both ways. I currently leave the original and the edit with the same color label thinking that the original was still pretty good but needed a bit of correcting. On the other hand, if I'm going to pull together my best photos, I would filter to 4 or 5 stars and I could see the desire to only see the edited versions, not the originals AND the edits.

So how do y'all handle that?

Thanks and sorry again for the "addendum" post.

[Jesperben]

I am labeling a lot of old pictures. I use a color label for showing which of these, I have finished and uploaded to my site on Zenfolio.

[snowman1]

Good question.
Because they are rapid, one-key, to assign they are an essential part of my workflow.
I use one colour to indicate which are portfolio candidates - which is to say they make the first cut - an initial cull.
Then I go back and then select the best of these (especially where I hava a number of very similar takes); and for those that make it into my portfolio - which essentially means I publish them, to myself - e.g. an album of my holiday - or wider - I use a colour to indicate personal, family, or public (corresponding to Flickr permissions).
And the 5th I use to mark a photo that has potential but needs work (more than a quick crop/exposure tweak). Those I come back to and allocate some time.

[Mke]

I normally use Color labels for highlighting images that have been published somewhere accessible to the general public - most commonly on my web site.

During image processing colors are occasionally used as progress markers within folders - although I generally prefer to move images between temporary folders as they are processed.

I use star rating to denote favorite images - very sparingly, normally using only 1 or 2 stars - applied to all versions of the image.

[HaraldE]

Morning,

I use the colour labels for one thing only. When I have uploaded a photo to SmugMug I set it as green.

Regards, Harald