Tags and color labels
Color-code your assets, build a tag vocabulary, accept the auto-suggestions worth keeping
Two ways to mark up clips: color labels for the visual pass, tags for the searchable vocabulary. They work together, not against each other.
Color labels
Seven colors: gray, green, purple, blue, yellow, red, orange. The hex values match the Finder labels you already know, so muscle memory carries.
Apply a color from the inspector's color row, or with Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+7. Ctrl+0 clears it. We use the same color system on assets, projects, and tags, so a color you assign to "Interview" can echo on every interview asset and the project they belong to.
How to actually use them: pick a meaning per project and stick with it. Ours is usually green for "use this," red for "skip," yellow for "needs trim." Three colors is plenty. Seven is too many to remember.
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The inspector color row with seven dots, the green dot selected.
1280 × 800px · Tight crop on a single control or region
Tags
Tags are the searchable layer. Open the inspector, type into the "+ Add tag" field, hit Enter. Tags are case-insensitive, so adding "Interview" and "interview" gives you one tag, not two.
The thing that makes tags worth using: ReelChest tokenizes filenames and folder paths and offers auto-suggestions from the words. If your clip is Interviews/Jane/Studio_Take2.mov, you'll see suggested tags for the words pulled out of the folders the clip lives in, not just the filename. Click + to accept the ones that mean something, × to dismiss for that asset, or "Block" to suppress a token everywhere if it's noise.
The tokenizer already filters the obvious garbage so you're not staring at it. Camera prefixes (IMG, DSC, DSCN, MVI, DJI, GOPR, GP, MAH, FILE, CLIP, REC), production junk (final, copy, take, edit, version, draft, master, render, export, output, untitled, new, old), pure-numeric tokens, date-shaped tokens (8-digit and 6-digit YYYYMMDD or YYMMDD), and common English function words all get stripped before suggestions appear. The result is a suggestion list of words you might actually search by, not the noise around them.
Anything you keep blocking (subject names that aren't useful as tags, location codes you don't search for) goes into the user blocklist on top, set in Settings → Tags. Filename hygiene helps, but the tokenizer does most of the lifting.
The sidebar Tags section shows the top 20 tags by usage. Click the star next to a tag to pin it, and pinned tags float to the top of the list. Click a tag in the sidebar to filter the grid by it.
Tag presets
For tag combinations you apply over and over, set them up as presets. Hit ⇧T (Shift-T, no Cmd) to open the Manage Tag Presets sheet. Each preset is a name plus a list of tags. From the inspector or a right-click menu, applying a preset stamps every tag in the preset onto the selected clips in one move.
Useful for repetitive curation: a "B-roll, this shoot" preset that drops three tags at once, or a "delivered" preset for the keepers. Saves the otherwise-manual typing of the same five tags into every keeper.
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The Manage Tag Presets sheet with a few named presets and their tag lists.
1280 × 800px · Modal or sheet over the app
A working vocabulary
Tags get out of hand fast if you let them. A few rules that hold up:
- Subjects, themes, locations as tags. "studio," "outdoor," "Jane," "B-roll."
- Workflow status as color labels, not tags. "Cut," "skip," "pending."
- Quality as star ratings. ⌘1 through ⌘5, ⌘0 to clear.
Auto-suggestions are tempting because they're free, but accept them sparingly. A tag you'll never search for is dead weight in the sidebar. Pin the five tags you actually filter by; let the rest live in autocomplete.