Colored labels: What can one expect?

[WP]

This rather recent article https://community.atlassian.com/forums/App-Central-articles/Colored-labels-are-now-available-in-Jira-BUT/ba-p/3201205 tells that colored labels are introduced to Jira, but in a form that one cannot oneself choose the color of the label --- according to the article, the color is chosen randomly.

As I'm in the task of setting up labels in a self-hosted instance which in some months will be migrated to the cloud:

Is this actually true?  I didn't find any other source for that.  Or is this just an intermediate state, and the ability to choose colors oneself is expected to be supported a bit later in the not-too-far future?

While the concept of colored labels would help us very much, we would need the ability to choose them ourselves, in order to be able to set up a senseful color concept, for different labels.

I.e. the half-finished concept described in the aforementioned article from our point of view would not improve things, but make things worse (and rises the question wether our concept how to set up things needs to be adapted).

[Nikola Perisic]

Hello @WP 

Yes, you are right. The colors are chosen randomly and currently, there's no option to choose the color of the label. Soon enough, the creation of work items will be completely changed and the concept of colored labels will be lost, leaving you with default labels.

My suggestion is, if you need to use a tag within one Jira space to use components which are tied to a specific space. Labels are intended for a global usage.

[WP]

Thank you for the quick answer.

The reason why I ended up with the labels is, that I have different pieces of information I want to tag issues with (say, somethings like 3 labels in average, in some cases maybe 5 or 6), but the boards only support three different custom fields, so I cannot distribute the information across several different fields.

Together with some other restrictions I need to cope with, labels seemed to be the simplest solution to achieve what I want.

But I will have another thought about the components.

[Gabriela - LeanZero]

Hi @WP , true. The request to choose the colour yourself is JRACLOUD-40855, opened in 2014, still Gathering Interest, 280 votes, no resolution, and its entire description is one line, I think it would be a nice feature to set a color to a label. The Server and DC twin JRASERVER-40855 sits in the same place. Twelve years at Gathering Interest isn't something to plan a colour scheme around.

That article sits on App Central, which is the Marketplace vendor board, so it isn't Atlassian stating it. I couldn't find an Atlassian announcement covering the colour behaviour either.

For colours you do pick, on your self-hosted instance it's Board, Configure, Card Colors, with JQL queries as the basis. One colour per card though, and the first query it matches wins, so it carries one axis of your concept rather than five.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-40855
https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwareserver/customizing-cards-938845307.html