Assigning Color Labels

Color labels are useful for naming and quickly identifying your processing plans for your images. Different colors can be used to represent different stages of your workflow. For example, as you review your photos you can quickly label files to upload, print, reject, review, or sharpen, or any other term that matches your workflow needs. Once your files have been labeled, you can click a color label in the Organize pane to instantly display all of the files assigned to that label.

Color labels, like tagging, categories, and ratings, are a way to set aside, organize, and group your photos without moving them into different folders.

If the Properties pane or Organize pane is not visible in Manage mode, click View | Properties or View | Organize.

Create a Color Label set

Begin by creating a label set so you can quickly select and assign specified labels. Once you have a label set in place, you can assign your images to the appropriate labels corresponding to your workflow.

To create a color label set:

In the Organize pane, click the Labels settings button and select New Label Set.
Enter a name for your new label set.
Enter names for your labels and click OK.

Once you have created color label sets, you can access them from the Organize pane by clicking the Labels settings button and selecting from the drop-down list. Before assigning a color label, make sure the intended label set is active. The active label set name is shown in brackets in the label header.

Turquoise labels indicate labeled files outside of the current label set.

Assign Color labels

You can assign color labels to your files by using the following:

Organize pane
Properties pane
Edit menu in Manage and View mode
Context menu
Keyboard shortcuts

ACDSee Pro 2 uses XMP to embed ACDSee Metadata into each file. Only some file formats and file extensions support XMP. These include GIF, JPEG, DNG, PNG, and TIF. In the case of these file formats, the ACDSee Metadata is embedded inside the file and so you can rename or move the file outside of ACDSee Pro 2 and still be able to retrieve the ACDSee Metadata. For formats that currently do not support XMP, including RAW, PSD, ABR, the ACDSee Metadata is written to a sidecar file that is stored in the same folder as its file.

To assign a color label to a file in the Organize pane:

In Manage mode, do one of the following:

Drag selected files to a color label in the Organize pane.
Drag the color label from the Organize pane to selected files.

To assign files to color labels in the Properties pane:

In the File List pane, select the files you want to assign a color rating.
Select ACDSee Metadata from the Properties pane drop-down menu
Select a color label from the Label drop-down menu.

To assign color labels using the Edit menu in Manage and View mode:

Click Edit | Label and then select a color label.

To assign color labels with the context menu:

Control–click the file, click Label, then select a label name.

To assign color labels using keyboard shortcuts:

Keyboard shortcuts are available for the seven color labels, plus Control–0 to clear the label (exactly the same as ratings, except Control is used instead of Command)

Search images assigned to a label

To search all images in the database assigned to a label:

Click the color label in the Organize pane to display all corresponding files in the File List pane.
Use Quick Search.

Command–click more than one color label in the Organize pane to display all matching color labels in the File List pane.

Removing color labels and color label sets

To remove a color label from a file:

In the File List pane, select one or more files you want to remove a label from.
Do one of the following:

Control–click a selected file, and then click Label | Unlabeled.
Drag selected files to the unlabeled icon in the Organize pane.

To delete a Label Set:

In the Organize pane, click the Labels settings button and select Edit Label Sets.
Select the set you want to delete from the Labels Sets drop-down list.
Click the delete button (–).