The manually set emblems option has been dropped in Nautilus file browser since Nautilus 3.0. In files & folders’ Properties window, there’s no Emblems tab any more.

Fortunately, there are a set of Nautilus scripts and one named Emblemize allows to add emblems to files & folders in Nautilus 3.0+ by right-clicking on them.

Install Emblemize script in Ubuntu 11.10 & 12.04:

Open up a terminal window and install it from ppa:dr3mro/nautilus-actions-extra:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dr3mro/nautilus-actions-extra
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nautilus-actions nautilus-actions-extra

Finally, re-start Nautilus by:

nautilus -q

I installed this in both 11.10 and 12.04.

In Ubuntu 11.10, I got this error “cp: cannot create regular file `/home/wraith/.config/nautilus-actions/nautilus-actions.conf’: No such file or directory”. Easily fixed by command:

touch ~/.config/nautilus-actions/nautilus-actions.conf

Maybe my system was out of date, I also got “gobject version mismatch” while starting nautilus. Just upgrade python-gobject in Synaptic Package Manager (sudo apt-get install synaptic).

In Ubuntu 12.04 (I’m running the daily build), need install nautilus-gksu first, download here.