Facebook photo tagging was introduced as an easy-to-use tool for sharing important moments of your life with your contacts. The ability to tag a friend in a photo to let him / her know you have uploaded a photo of him may be fun. However the feature has been so abused and spammed that many people prefer to stay away from being tagged.
To start, here’s how Facebook photo-tagging works: once you are tagged in your friend’s photo, it becomes visible in your “Photos” section. Moreover, this update is sent to your public timeline and this photo thumbnail is added to your main photo stream on your profile page.
Why may you want to reduce the photo tagging? There are plenty of Facebook applications that tag you automatically which often clutters your public timeline. Besides, with newly-introduced features like “group tagging“, photo tagging has become more and more popular which means it results in more clutter.
If you are tired of irrelevant photo-tagging and don’t want your tagged photos to interfere with your own albums and uploads, here are a couple of settings you should be aware of:
Prevent your friends from seeing the photos you are tagged in:
As far as I know, you can’t completely disable the feature and avoid being tagged. However you can reduce the clutter by not sending your friends a public update once you are tagged.
Here’s how you can find the option:
- Click “Account” in the top-right corner and there “Privacy Settings”;
- Scroll down a bit to a little blue link “Customize Settings”:
- Now click “Edit” button next to “Photos and videos you’re tagged in” and select “Customize“:
There you will be able to set that the photos you are tagged in are only visible to you.
As you can see from the screenshot above, you can also hide those photos (which are uploaded by someone else and thus are not under your control) from some of your contacts. This way you can protect your privacy by preventing your parents or boss from seeing some (possibly embarrassing) photos before you login to remove the tag.
Disable Photo Tag Auto-Suggestions
When any of your friends upload photos to his Facebook profile, he will be prompted to tag you if any person on their photos looks *like* you.
This is a comparatively new feature that is called “tag suggestions” and is aimed to “make tagging multiple photos even more convenient.” It uses face recognition technology to automatically find one and the same person on all photos you upload and prompt you to tag that person with one click.
You may be OK with that but you should know that you can turn this feature off any time (in case you don’t want to be tagged too often): in the same section of your Privacy settings click “Edit” button next to “Suggest photos of me to friends” (and disable auto-suggestions there).
Are you aware of any other Facebook settings to control the photo tagging feature? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
Lastly, here are a few more essential Facebook privacy settings you should be aware of:
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