Facebook 101 Tagging & Tag Suggestions  

What is tagging and how does it work? In simple terms, a tag annotates a photo, enabling the poster of a photo and others to say who is in a photo and to share the photo with those people. People tag photos because it’s an easy way to share photos and memories. Unlike photos that get forgotten on a camera or an album on a hard drive, tagged photos on Facebook help people and their friends relive everything from that life-altering skydiving trip to a birthday dinner with friends. They also enable people to share experiences on Facebook they may have missed in real life—from the college kid who sees everyone at Sunday dinner to the soldier overseas seeing friendly faces at a family reunion. That’s why tags make photos one of the most popular features on Facebook. What is Tag Suggestions and how does it work? Tags have become an essential tool for sharing important moments on Facebook. In some cases, Facebook users complained that the process is too arduous. Imagine tagging your cousin and her fiancé in 64 different pictures you took at their engagement party. That’s why we launched Tag Suggestions—to give people the ability to tag multiple photos in the same album (e.g. all the photos from a friend’s wedding) at once or to tag multiple photos of the same person (e.g. all the photos of Jane from the camping trip) without having to comb through the album.

• You are notified of photo tags by default. • Once you untag a photo, you cannot be retagged. • You can remove any photo tag of yourself and you can turn on “tag review” so that you can approve tags before they appear on your timeline. • We only suggest tags to your friends on Facebook when they upload photos of you. • We don’t have the ability to “search” for a face amongst the billions of faces in our system. • Opting out of Tag Suggestions is easy and when you opt out we delete the file we use to suggest you. • You have a privacy setting to control who can see photos you are tagged in on your timeline.  

Tagging gives people control Unlike other photo sharing services around the web, tagging empowers people with information about what photos of them exist out there. Even better, tagging gives a person the control to take action on a particular photo. He or she can ‘like’ it, comment on it, share it, untag it, report it to Facebook, or ask a friend to remove it. If for any reason you don’t want your name to be suggested for a tag, you can disable suggested tags in your Privacy Settings. For more information on this topic, go to h ttp s://www.fa c ebook.c om /h elp/tag- su gg estions.  

 

Updated July 2012