Bridge: Changing color labels on a file changes its modification-date. It should not.

Hi David,

Thanks for the reply. Is there not a solution to this issue that could be considered?
Surely I can't be the only one who has this problem? :-/

- Brett.

I was trying to think of an easy workaround, but I hate to say I don't have any great ideas right now. I imagine that having more granular sorting options would be helpful for you, specifically "Sort by Camera Raw edit time.", but I don't think there is any metadata being created or tracked right now to clearly differentiating that kind of edit (in time) from other metadata edits. I tried Lightroom's "Edit time" sorting, but it appears that application also considers rating and label edits to be "edits" for the the sake or sorting.

One thing I thought of that might help you is to use the Camera Raw section of the filter panel. You can filter on files with "No Settings" and "Custom Settings." If it's the case that you are labeling files that don't already have settings, and that the files you've been working on most recently do have settings, the filter might help you, but obviously it's not a 100% solution.

Another thing you might try is using the Collections panel to create a "Recent Edits" collection and add/remove files you want to concentrate on working on in the short term. Yes, this would involve manually managing, essentially, a list of in-progress assets instead of the ease of a totally automated sorting/filtering, but it is at least one more way Bridge allows you to logically differentiate one set of assets from another, and it would allow you to sort one set of files by mod date independent of any others.

Again—sorry—no great ideas, but I hope some of these suggestions at least help, in part.

Thinking more about collections--adding or removing a file from a collection does not modify the file itself, so if it's possible of you to switch from using color labels for (maybe at least some) organizational purposes to using collections, then you would not have the problem that organizational changes make your files sort differently. Of course, since membership in a collection is not metadata that's embedded in a file, it won't be metadata that can be shared between different computers.

Hi David - thanks for the exhaustive replies! :)
I'll definitely take a closer look at Collections, and being a freelancer working on my own, sharing metadata is not a concern for me.
Thanks again!