Colored labels: What can one expect?

Question

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).

Monika Ambrozowicz_Seibert_ · Answer

Hi @WP, from what has been shared in that article and other community discussions, the native colored labels feature in Jira Cloud does currently assign colors automatically and randomly rather than letting you pick them yourself. Whether that's a permanent design decision or a temporary state hasn't been publicly confirmed by Atlassian.

If you need full control over label colors before or regardless of what Atlassian ships, there's a Marketplace app called Awesome Custom Fields that includes a dedicated Color Labels field type for Jira Cloud. Full disclosure: I'm affiliated with the team behind the app.

The Color Labels field type lets you define your own labels and assign specific colors to each one, which is exactly the kind of intentional color scheme you're describing — where green means one thing, red means another, and so on. You'd set up the field once, configure your color-to-label mapping, and add it to your issue screens. It replaces the native label field for the issues where you want color control.

Since you're currently on a self-hosted instance and migrating to Cloud, the timing works in your favor: you can set up and validate your color concept in Cloud before the migration, rather than building something on Server/DC that won't carry forward cleanly. Awesome Custom Fields has a free trial so you can test your label setup before committing.

If you have any questions, I'd be happy to help.

Gabriela - LeanZero · Answer

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

WP_d2mrcj · Answer

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.