Upgrade to Mavericks: rules with Color Labels fail

I have several rules that have "Color Label" conditions that all worked perfectly in Lion.
After I upgraded to Mavericks, those rules behave completely erratically.

Say, I have the following rule:

ALL

KIND IS NOT folder
Color Label is NONE

THEN

SET Color Label to Green

When I preview this rule on a group of files with no, a red and a yellow label respectively, Hazel always shows a match for this rule, which is obviously wrong.

Then, when I run this rule on the files, Hazel picks only the file with the red label and changes this to green??

Any suggestions how to fix this are greatly appreciated!

Steve

I can't answer your question, but I can give you some background. Mavericks has changed how labels (now tags) works. An item in the file system can now have multiple tags at the same time. You can no longer rely on the old rule where setting a colour on a file/folder meant the old colour was removed.

Any hazel rule that assumes this could be broken in Mavericks.

A good writeup on this is at http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/8/
The following page also describes how they are implemented (if you want to know the geeky details).

DaleS,

thank you for your reply.

I found out that the upgrade installation of Mavericks severely messed up Hazel and a few other programs. So I did a "nuke & pave" install, which removed the biggest issues.

However, there is still an issue with Color labels.

In Hazel, the "Set Color Label" action seems to works as expected (say, setting the color to "yellow"). In Finder, I can see the yellow dot next to the file name, and see a "Yellow" tag. In Path Finder, the file names color is changed to yellow, as expected.

However, in Hazel's rules preview, the file only shows the "Yellow" tag, the "Color Label" field is empty. Also, the "Color Label" condition treats the file as having no color label, even though the previous rule set it.

So, aside from the IMHO confusing mess Apple created mixing color and text labels, shouldn't Hazel behave consistently regarding those attributes?

Can you post screenshots of this? Also, make sure you use Finder, and not PathFinder, to double-check things.

Ok,

this is the rule that worked in Lion:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6cjlm2tqzcvzgh7/Color%20Label-1.png

This is the file information before the rule is applied:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/wg935tw34rk1dby/Color%20Label-2.png

This is the file information after the rule is run:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/dyaxxrr4rhyvxgx/Color%20Label-3.png

It has a Tag "Gelb" ("Yellow") with a yellow dot, but the Color Label is empty. This is the Finder Information:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bu64tlm2hg1ohto/Color%20Label-4.png

Thanks,

Steve

Thanks. I'll look into it. Have you tried using the Add Tags feature instead of setting the color label?

As there seems to be an automatic conversion from "color labels" to "color tags" going on behind the scenes (in the OS itself?), I am currently duplicating all my rules that use color labels and convert them to color tags.

This is a real bummer because I rely on color labels heavily in all my workflows, not only with Hazel conditions and actions but also using them in custom shell scripts and Applescripts, which I almost all have to modify now. :evil:

At least Path Finder and Totalfinder still show a file's color tag as the "classic" color label.

Thanks,

Steve

I'm also wondering if there is a language issue. If you switch your primary language to english, does the behavior change?

I did several tests and it does not seem like a language issue.

It rather depends on whether the file is on a local or a NAS drive.

I tested this with an mp3 file, first on a local folder on my Mac's HD. In Hazel's rule preview, the color label shows up correctly, as well as the corresponding color tag.
(BTW: the action "Set Color Label" to "None" did not remove the color label of the file in my tests)

Then I moved the file to a folder on my NAS (ext3 or ext4 file system - can't remember -, connected via SMB).
Here, only the color tag is shown, no color label.

Then I moved the file back to the local folder, and the color label shows up again.

I repeated this test, this time enabling Spotlight indexing on the network share (a small share with only about 20 files), but this did not change the behavior.

I also ran "mdls" on the file in each of the locations and compared the results.

There are two obvious differences:

1) the file in the local folder has an additional "kMDItemDateAdded" (as is expected)

2) the file in the local folder has "kMDItemFSFinderFlags = 4", whereas the file in the NAS folder has "kMDItemFSFinderFlags = (null)".

I could not find an explanation what this attribute is so do not know if it is relevant to the problem.

ext3/4 do not support color labels. That is strictly an HFS+ thing (which is what OS X uses). I'm not sure, but extended attributes (where tags are stored) may be supported by ext3/4 so that might explain the odd mismatch. Also, since this is a network filesystem, there may be further "fidelity" loss depending on whether the file protocol supports the filesystem features as well.