Q: I hate the new tags in Mavericks, need coloured folders!!

Silly Old Codger wrote:

 

I have been a Mac user for over 30 years - good times & bad - But this is the first time I have felt so badly let down.

I guess you didn't use iDVD

It seems like it'll be awhile more before Apple addresses our pleas, so perhaps this anecdote will amuse while we wait. For those who extoll tagging, there have of course been colored tags in use in Mac Mail for years, where they're called flags. I use them to prioritize responses, such as blue for "pending," yellow for "in process," orange for "warm," red for "Hot, do it immediately." How is that working for me? Today's "flagged" count:

Gray            3

Purple        14

Blue           80

Green       878

Yellow       259

Orange     325

Red        2,147

DABio:

The new OS update 10.9.1 has no changes to the tags and no labels option.  This shows Apple doe not listen anymore!  Certainly, this reflects the changes since we lost Steve, who actually listened to all the users. There are not just a few of us who have addressed this issue of missing labels, just google it and it is all over the Web. What is sad is the Mavericks development team seems to care less what Mac users think, much as do the Windows code writers. As previously noted, keep letting Apple know and maybe, someone will listen?

10.9.1 installed.

Sluggish Finder open and save dialogue boxes issue resolved

Folder/file labels… nope?

Hi, I sent Apple feedback re my / our disappointment that the important color label feature was not restored in the Mabericks update.

Ditto

Fingers crossed

Pontotoc Peg wrote:

Hi, I sent Apple feedback re my / our disappointment that the important color label feature was not restored in the Mabericks update.

Just curious, how many times did you send feedback to Apple requesting that they bring back Labels?

Just the once from me.

Just once, shortly after my initial post in this item.

I've sent feedback about 10 times - whenever I get the time between trying to work with Tags.

I've resorted to using Folders to move stuff on through my work process because Tags are a two-step process to change the colour - besides being impossible to find at a glance.

Really bad Apple!

Someone pointed out Folder Foundry app already. But I use a free app called img2icns.

http://www.img2icnsapp.com/

It works very well. I colorize a larger folder image (say 512 px), and add any images I want, then use the app to convert it to a folder icon.

Here are a couple folders I made:

Yes but that does nothing to help the actual problem of people who want the colored 'LABELS' back. There have always been third party Apps to colour folders. As, I believe, the ability to colour folders in OSX was never a feature, it is the labels people are wanting returned, as nice a job as you did on your folders.

Cheers

Pete

True. I read most of the posts, and I don't like the circles either. However, colored folders have much more impact and recognition quality than those little circles (even in list view), and they are still doable in Mavericks.
I always felt that the Apple OS developers could easily have made both folders and labels customizable with the color picker. Having just a handful of colors is limiting, too. I've made a couple dozen plain colored folders for use on my mac.

Colored folders are fine as far as folders go, but I use labels for applications and individual documents, which would be difficult to have to change their individual icons.

Yup, same here. I have to say that I've been really impressed with 10.9 so far (waited for 10.9.1 before upgrading), but losing the graphical clarity of the older labels was a real shocker. I used labels regularly to help clarify different stages of work (grey for "NA," red for "nope," green for "that's it!"), and the dots just aren't clear enough by comparison. I like the tagging idea, they just need to bring back the graphical appearance of the labels. Or even if they put the dot next to the folder, rather than way off to the right column (why the huge space anyway?).

A couple of workarounds I've found: 1) add more sort categories, so the dot gets pushed closer to the folder/file name, 2) add the "tags" sort category, so you can group all like-coloured tags together, 3) use narrower Finder windows (which is lame, particularly since we now have tabs and full-screen in the Finder). Obviously not as nice as just seeing right away the colour of the label, but better than the default behaviour, imho.