Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual

Color Labels

Mac OS X 10.5 includes a welcome blast from the Mac's distant past: 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 menu, or the shortcut menu that appears when you Control-click/right-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 2-8 shows the routine.

What Labels Are Good For

After you've applied labels to icons, you can perform some unique file-management tasks—in some cases, on all of them simultaneously, even if they're scattered across multiple hard drives. For example:

Figure 2-8. Use the File menu, menu, or shortcut menu to apply label tags to highlighted icons. Instantly, the icon's name takes on the selected shade. In a list or column view, the entire row takes on that shade, as shown in Figure 2-9. (If you choose the little X, you're removing any labels that you may have applied.)

• Round up files with Find. Using the Find command described in Chapter 3, you can round up all icons with a particular ...