Grid cells not tinted with label colors since updating to LR 15

Forum|Forum|1 month ago
February 22, 2026
3 replies
84 views

Since the update to LR 15, I am having a frustrating problem with grid view, where tint grid cells with label colors is no longer working for items that were previously tinted. Instead in the upper left corner of each of the image grid windows, it will say “[Color label name]/[number of stars]” in the upper left corner. For example if I had it labeled red with 3 stars it will say “Red/3,” and if it is yellow with one star it will say “Yellow/1.” The stars do show up with the image, as do the flags, but not the color tint. I can add the tint by selecting the image and tapping the associated color number. For example, I select images that have Yellow in the upper corner and tap the 7 key and it adds the tint and changes the text to “Yellow_Published” which is a nice idea to include the word “Published” which is what Yellow signifies to me. The screenshot of grid view attached shows what all the images look like now (left) and what happens if I hit the 7 key (right). But I have tens of thousands of images in my catalog. I can’t go back and spend the time to fix all of them!

This is causing me major headaches right now in my professional work, slowing me down considerably in getting materials to a client.

Note that I have tried the following:

• Making sure the View Option is checked to show the color tint of 20%. (see screenshot)

• Updating to the latest version — Lightroom 15.2

Other specs: M3 Mac running OS 15.7.3

Please help!

—HG

H

helenniumAuthor

Known Participant

Hi @JohanElzenga and @Jim Wilde,

Thanks so much for your ideas. They led me to a partial — but only a partial solution that is still unresolved and looks even more like a bug to me.

I did not remember, but I guess I had indeed customized the labels at one point and why LR decided to dump them with the upgrade without warning I don’t know, since that never happened with previous upgrades (I’ve been using this since LR 6). I decided to see if I could recover the color tints by editing the Color Label set. This is what it looked like when I followed your advice and looked at the Color Label Set (1st screenshot).

After reading what you both said, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try putting my wording back and the colors suddenly reappeared in Grid View in the open folder, but even after clicking “Change” (2nd screenshot) the change does not stay applied after I go to a different folder, and it reverts to what you see in that first screenshot. Now what?

—HG

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

Your screenshots don’t load, so I can’t see what you mean. The problem with a custom label set it that people often change the label set text, but forget to save that set with a new name. In that case, an update could revert the set to its default text and so you lose the new text, and consequently the label color.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

H

helenniumAuthor

Known Participant

Now I understand. What a mess, that I apparently made inadvertently. I probably watched a tutorial that told me about that feature without explaining the potential downside down the line. I guess the only way to fix it is when I come upon a folder where this mixture of labels occurs, is to sort by label, shift-select all the ones that I want in a particular color label category, and then apply that color with the Lightroom default active. Seems much safer to use the Lightroom default going forward to prevent upgrades from interfering in the future. I had no luck searching the label metadata for the text, which is what the Color Label editing popup suggests. If you happen to know how that works, please let me know. But anyway, thank you again for your advice.

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

Label colors are assigned by the text of the color. It seems that you used the default for a long time (where the text is the name of the color), but more recently you changed this and added that ‘_Published’ to the word yellow. That means that older images, that only have the word ‘yellow’ for a yellow color label, now suddenly have the wrong word, because a yellow label is now defined by the text ‘Yellow_Published’. This has nothing to do with an upgrade, but with your decision to change the label text while lots of older images were already labeled with the default text.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

Jim Wilde

Community Expert

It looks to me that you are using an edited version of the default Color Label set. The photo on the left in the grid seems to have been labelled using the default set, but as that is not the currently-enabled set it shows the White label in the grid.

Check the Metadata menu>Color Label Set to see what set is currently in use.

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