I never use color labels in Bridge, but I just checked how it works (bridge CS5). It seems that a file is associated with a text label, not its color. For example, if RED = "selected" and a file is given this label, when you change "selected" to "FlickR" in Preferences, your file is still associated with "selected" label. As the new label for RED is now "FlickR", the text label "selected" is given a white color by default. Yes it's a weird way to manage labels, I agree.

A solution exists though for you to fix your labels without too much effort. Use the Filter tab to filter your files by their original text labels, and then assign them the new labels, then they will be colored again. Do the same for each previous label you had assigned, and you're done.

Hope that helps
Erick

To be honest, I'm shocked that it's been an issue since v3 and they don't at the very least give a warning when you do it. But you'd have thought they could have fixed it by CS5.

I don't think they've 'fixed' it because there isn't anything to fix, when you change a labels description and you have other files under the same label with a different description it causes a conflict, i.e. if you had 20 files under the original red label description 'select' then you change the description for red files to read 'to do' and label another 20 files with your new description what do you think would happen if you combined the two sets of 20 files into the same folder, you can't have the same label with two different descriptions, hence Bridge throws a wobbly (deliberately) and colours them all white to indicate to you that's there's something amiss with the labelling.

I'm not sure the link I sent you explains that too well (not sure I did either) but I sent it to you to show that it's not a fault and that it's been like that since CS3, and also to show you how to get your old labels back.

By the way that's why Adobe posted a "solution" rather than a cure.

Now all I've got is three hard discs with many folders containing thousands of white labelled images.

I might not have grasped your situation correctly but based on what I think you mean this may save you some time:

- Go into the folder on your hard disk and rename all the labels back to what they were by default when you labelled the files, that should then see you colours come back to how they were.

- Now assign each label coloured file to a seperate folder, i.e. all the reds together etc

- Then de-label all the files in that folder

- Then change the description of your labels in Bridge

- Go back into your file with all the old 'reds' and select and label them with your new descriptions

- Then from this day forth all your coloured labels should match up when you add new labelled files

- Not knowing how you've got your files set up this may or may not be a quick process

The key is keeping all your old colours seperate so you don't lose track of them, once you've de-labelled, changed descriptions and re-labelled them under your new system you can mix files in folders and they'll all have their individual colours showing.

As the link said changing the label descriptions does absolutely nothing to the files themselves, it only changes the way bridge interprets what colour matches what description - hence in a folder with mixed files all the individual colours have to have the same representative description.