How To Use Facebook's New Facial Recognition and Batch Tagging Features
Posted: October 15, 2011 by AppleWorld in Labels: Facebook, How To, Mac
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Facebook is a really undergoing some structural changes lately. First, they tried their hand at knocking Foursquare out of the race with Places, and now the company has completely overhauled Photos with a faster UI, batch tagging and high resolution photo uploading. We went and tried out these new features to see if they're all that they're cracked up to be and show you how to use them.
We're grateful for the UI change that made tagging ourselves and our photomates so much easier. Now when you upload a batch of photos, Facebook's photo uploader has a face recognition feature, so that you can easily and instantaneously tag at your heart's content without searching around for the photos with people actually in them.
In some instances, the photo recognition feature can even pick out faces depicted in subtle ways, like this little boy's reflection in a Corvette's rear view mirror at last year's International Car Show in San Francisco. In this case, you want to ungroup these photos and plop 'em back in the "faceless" queue towards the bottom of the page.
I can attest that the amount of clicking and page loading it took just to load up one photo to tag my friend was a true head case. Eventually, I gave up tagging others and just everyone else have at it in their own spare time.
Fortunately, batch tagging is now available in Facebook's photo albums, and it's fairly easy to use. Simply open up the photo album and click on "Tag Photos." You'll then be prompted to select the name of the person you want to tag (in this instance, myself), and then you can click on the position your face is located in each photo. You can do this for many of your friends, so if you have a slew of group photos it should be no problem to tag all the appropriate people.
You can still use the ancient method of tagging people if you so choose--each individual photo still has the option to click and tag people, one-by-one.
You can now upload up to a 2048-pixel resolution. Like on Flickr and other high end photo sharing sites, your friends will be able to downlaod the high resolution version for their own archiving. No more holding on to resized, compressed photos--now, your friends and family can have the real photos that you have hanging out on your hard drive, without the headache of packaging them up into an email or uploading them to an FTP server.
Using facial recognition
We're grateful for the UI change that made tagging ourselves and our photomates so much easier. Now when you upload a batch of photos, Facebook's photo uploader has a face recognition feature, so that you can easily and instantaneously tag at your heart's content without searching around for the photos with people actually in them.
In some instances, the photo recognition feature can even pick out faces depicted in subtle ways, like this little boy's reflection in a Corvette's rear view mirror at last year's International Car Show in San Francisco. In this case, you want to ungroup these photos and plop 'em back in the "faceless" queue towards the bottom of the page.
Batch tagging a ton of photos
I can attest that the amount of clicking and page loading it took just to load up one photo to tag my friend was a true head case. Eventually, I gave up tagging others and just everyone else have at it in their own spare time.
Fortunately, batch tagging is now available in Facebook's photo albums, and it's fairly easy to use. Simply open up the photo album and click on "Tag Photos." You'll then be prompted to select the name of the person you want to tag (in this instance, myself), and then you can click on the position your face is located in each photo. You can do this for many of your friends, so if you have a slew of group photos it should be no problem to tag all the appropriate people.
You can still use the ancient method of tagging people if you so choose--each individual photo still has the option to click and tag people, one-by-one.
Downloading High Resolution photos
You can now upload up to a 2048-pixel resolution. Like on Flickr and other high end photo sharing sites, your friends will be able to downlaod the high resolution version for their own archiving. No more holding on to resized, compressed photos--now, your friends and family can have the real photos that you have hanging out on your hard drive, without the headache of packaging them up into an email or uploading them to an FTP server.