The Facebook Blog

Original Post Dec. 15, 2010.

Every day, people add more than 100 million tags to photos on Facebook. They do it because it's an easy way to share photos and memories. Unlike photos that get forgotten in a camera or an unshared album, tagged photos help you and your friends relive everything from that life-altering skydiving trip to a birthday dinner where the laughter never stopped. Tags make photos one of the most popular features on Facebook.

While tags are an essential tool for sharing important moments, many of you have said tagging photos can be a chore. (Like that time you had to tag your cousin and her fiancé over and over and over again in 64 different pictures of their engagement party, and then go back and tag the guests.)

Since October, we've been working to make this process easier for you. First we added group tagging, so you could type one name and apply it to multiple photos of the same person. Now we're announcing tag suggestions, which will make tagging multiple photos even more convenient.

Because photos are such an important part of Facebook, we want to be sure you know exactly how tag suggestions work: When you or a friend upload new photos, we use face recognition software—similar to that found in many photo editing tools—to match your new photos to other photos you're tagged in. We group similar photos together and, whenever possible, suggest the name of the friend in the photos.

If for any reason you don't want your name to be suggested, you will be able to disable suggested tags in your Privacy Settings. Just click "Customize Settings" and "Suggest photos of me to friends." Your name will no longer be suggested in photo tags, though friends can still tag you manually. You can learn more about this feature in our Help Center.

Now if you upload pictures from your cousin's wedding, we'll group together pictures of the bride and suggest her name. Instead of typing her name 64 times, all you'll need to do is click "Save" to tag all of your cousin's pictures at once. By making tagging easier than before, you're more likely to know right away when friends post photos. We notify you when you're tagged, and you can untag yourself at any time.  As always, only friends can tag each other in photos.

We'll be debuting tag suggestions to users in the United States over the next few weeks. Look for tags suggestions when you upload groups of photos that feature the same friends, and see how they can help you share life's occasions—large and small—every day.

Justin Mitchell, a Facebook engineer, is looking forward to spending more time making memories and less time tagging them.

Originally Published on Thursday, September 30, 2010:

Photos are one of the things people love to share, and they are often the most meaningful. Sometimes it's snapshots of the ordinary—your new haircut, a homemade cupcake. Sometimes it's bigger, more profound—a high-school graduation, a first tooth, a newborn! Photos often bring us the best news of the day.

When we originally got started on Photos, we only had two people working on it. We didn't build out a lot of features; we just focused on making sure photos were easy to share and this made Photos a great social experience. But we also wanted to give people on Facebook the best quality photo product on the web.

So I'm excited to announce three big improvements to Photos: high resolution images so you can store bigger pictures, a better viewer for browsing photos, and a simpler uploader when you have lots of images. The team has been working hard to get these done, and we'll make these available to everyone over the next month.  

Higher Resolution

Starting today, we will be rolling out support for print-quality, high-resolution photos. And unlike on many other online services, you don't need any kind of premium or paid account.

We're increasing the size of the photos stored from 720 pixels to 2048 pixels on the largest edge, for an 8 times increase overall. I'm really excited to be launching this feature. To see the quality of these pictures, you can view National Geographic's "Top-Rated Your Shot Photos (September)" album or Sports Illustrated's "Football Across America" album. Download high-resolution photos by clicking the "Download" link.  

A Better Photo Viewer

The new viewer makes it simpler and faster to navigate photos. You can now view photos and even whole albums without even having to go to a new page. Instead, the photo opens in the center of your screen, and you close it when you're done. There's no need to go back and forth between pages or reload the page.

A new light box (the dark frame around your pictures) makes viewing photos a richer experience. We also rewrote all the code for the viewer from scratch, so paging through photos will be noticeably faster.

Easier Tagging and Uploading

We also wanted to make it easier to tag photos. When people upload a set of photos, they are often of events like weddings and birthday parties where people are with the same group of friends and family. With our new uploader, you will be able to tag multiple photos in the same album all at once, as well as tag photos of the same person with a lot less effort.

Lastly, we've completely rebuilt our photo uploader to be more stable and reliable. It now uses the latest Flash technology, so that your experience getting photos onto Facebook is an easy one—especially when you have lots of them. While this change is mostly behind the scenes, we think you'll notice a big improvement.

All of us on the Photos team at Facebook are excited to make the experience of sharing photos the best on the web. Enjoy.

Sam, product manager for Facebook Photos, is now tagging Beau, Dan, Iain, Jun, Justin, Makinde, Paul, Roman, Rong, Stefan and Tom in team photos.