Something I’ve wanted to ask for a long time: Is there a specific reason why there are only 7 colors for labels? If not, I suggest to allow more colors.
Colors are like lighthouses. They make it possible to recognize the meaning of a document long before you have read the title.
Maybe I’m the only one who has this need. Or would others welcome that too? 
Doesn’t DT follow the color scheme of MacOS labels? If so, then there are 8 colors. Colors are represented as binary numbers using 3 bits which translate to base 10 numbers 0-7.
We do follow suit with macOS’ use of seven color labels… and the hidden eighth: None 
They might do for you, but not for those of us who are colour-blind! 
Sadly for me, seven colours are already more than I can use. Colour-blindness is not usually thought of as a disability, but it is surprising what limitations it imposes on you. I once sent someone off to look for something that I told them was blue, and they had a really hard time because it was actually purple – but I didn’t know that.
Oh, I actually hadn’t thought of that. What are your lighthouses? Icons? They can probably fulfill a similar purpose.
Yes, that was to be expected. Too bad. But so be it
Yes, icons are more useful for me. Here is a screengrab of my Obsidian vault. As you can see, there is colour too, but that is more for separation than for meaning.
And incidentally the icons are not part of the name of anything: they are applied by CSS within Obsidian (as are the colours). The file and folder names only use standard characters in Finder to avoid any potential problems with non-standard characters.
Edit: I should give a shoutout to Bryan Jenks, who is the author of the CSS that I use here. His YouTube videos on Obsidian are very good.
I see. I almost don’t know Obsidian, but I see more than 7 colors here. Apparently there are others who think this makes sense… for people who are not colorblind, of course 
In Obsidian the sky is the limit for colours because you can edit the CSS to give you whatever you want. I don’t do that because it would have no point for me. I just took the colours as they were in the CSS I downloaded, with the exception of making one slot blue because that usually stands out for me (although it could be purple without me knowing it ).
You could use emojis in group names if that helps? Not recommend for file names though:
Thanks for the hint! I will certainly experiment with this
Custom metadata : If you’re using the Pro or Server edition of DEVONthink, it’s possible to add emojis to custom metadata in Preferences > Data . You can do this on metadata using a string-based attribute, e.g., Single-line Text . So you could add a 
to an Approved attribute.
I am color-blind too. I love labels but it has nothing to do with colors; they are an additional means to identify particular documetns beyond Groups and Tags. They are quite useful even if you were to set all the colors to be the same.
I would love for another few bits to be added to labels so we had the option of 64 rather than 7 or 8.
I suspect however that this might create a situation where older versions of DT are not compatible with newer databases. I don’t think the benefit of more labels outweighs such an incompatibility.
Except in a case where someone is kicking the tires on an upgrade, I wonder if backward-compatibility is a thing.
And there are tags which support colors. Or custom metadata sets.
Yes that’s probably the best argument why more labels are not needed as a feature. You can do as you wish with custom metadata.
I think a good number of people run hardware which limits them from running the latest MacOS version and thus limits running the latest DT release in some situations. But they might sync their database to a different computer which does run the latest DT release.
And with how good Apple hardware is, the impetus to buy a new Mac is greatly lessened. Just last month I finally retired a 2012 MacBook Pro I have been using all these years! 12+ years is pretty amazing IMHO.
I know how to search eg for an icon of a certain metadata field with an intelligent group. Like this, for example:
Can I also do this in the DT search field?
Sure, just use the advanced search which will automatically update the search field.
Thank you. This, for example, finds what it is supposed to find
mdstatus==🟢
What do I have to replace 
with if I want to find everything with an entry in this field?
