Facebook photos get handy facial recognition technology

by Stevie Smith - Jul 5 2010, 08:34

Beyond the convenience of Facebook’s quick messaging and social sharing, there are certain service elements that can begin to grate after prolonged usage. One such annoyance that Facebook is working to eliminate is the tedious process of tagging friends and family in uploaded photos.

With more than 100 million photos added to Facebook every day, the world’s leading social network has announced that testing has started on “a faster and easier way for you to tag your own photos,” without having to manually assign identities from one snapshot to the next.

The revised Facebook Photos platform utilises the same face detection technology that digital cameras have used for many years, enabling Facebook account holders to add tags across entire albums by simply assigning a name to one specific picture when the network asks, “Whose face is this?”

“With this feature, tagging is faster since you don’t need to select a face,” outlined Facebook Photos product manager Sam Odio via the official Facebook blog.

“It’s already selected for you, just like those rectangles you see around your friends’ faces when you take a photo with a modern digital camera,” he added. “All that’s left for you to do is type a name and hit enter. Cool, huh?”

The first in a series of experience-improving Facebook features due to be rolled out over the coming months, the new photo-tagging system is presently only available via a limited test run.

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