Section 2.10. Color Labels

2.10. Color Labels

Mac OS X includes a welcome feature that isn't available on Windows: icon labels. This feature lets you tag selected icons with one of seven different labels, each of which has both a text label and a color associated with it.

To do so, highlight the icons. Open the File menu (or the shortcut menu that appears when you Control-click the icons). There, under the heading Color Label, you'll see seven colored dots, which represent the seven different labels you can use. Figure 2-16 shows the routine.

2.10.1. What Labels are Good For

After you've applied labels to icons, you can perform some unique file-management tasks . For example:

• Round up files with Spotlight . Using the Spotlight file-finding command described later in this chapter, you can round up all icons with a particular label. Thereafter, moving these icons at once is a piece of cake: Choose Edit Select All, and then drag any one of the highlighted icons out of the results window and into the target folder or disk.

• Sort a list view by label . No other Mac sorting method lets you create an arbitrary order for the icons in a window. When you sort by label, the Mac creates alphabetical clusters within each label grouping, as shown in Figure 2-17.

• Track progress . Use different color labels to track the status of files in a certain project. The first drafts have no labels at all. Once they've been edited and approved, make them blue. Once they've been sent to the home office, they turn purple.

Figure 2-17. Sorting by label lets you create several different alphabetical groups within a single list. (The ability to sort by label is available only if you first make the label column visible. Do so by choosing View Show View Options and turning on the Label checkbox.)

Heck, you could have all kinds of fun with this: Money-losing projects get red tints ; profitable ones get green; things that make you sad are blue.

Or maybe not.

2.10.2. Changing Labels

When you first install Mac OS X, the seven labels in the File menu are named for the colors they show: Red, Orange, Yellow, and so on. Clearly, the label feature would be much more useful if you could rewrite these labels, tailoring them to your purposes.

Doing so is easy. Choose Finder Preferences. Click the Labels button. Now you see the dialog box shown in Figure 2-18, where you can edit the text of each label.

Figure 2-18. Top left: In the Labels tab of the Preferences window, you can change the predefined label text. Each label can be up to 31 letters and spaces long.
Bottom right: Now your list and column views reveal meaningful text tags instead of simple color names .