Facebook brings facial recognition to photos

Facebook has announced that it will add facial recognition functionality to let users automatically identify friends in photos.

A “tag suggestion” feature created to identify people in uploaded pictures should be rolled out to all US users in the next few weeks, Facebook engineer Justin Mitchell said late on Wednesday in a blog post. There was no word on when the new feature would roll out to the rest of the world.

“Now if you upload pictures from your cousin’s wedding, we’ll group together pictures of the bride and suggest her name,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell writes that the social network has also introduced a feature called “Group tagging“, allowing you to type one name and apply it to multiple photos of the same person.

“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.”

More than 100 million “tags” are added to photos at Facebook daily, according to the engineer.

When a Facebook user uploads digital pictures, newly added software matches faces to those that have been tagged, or named, in other photos, Mitchell said.

People who don’t want their names automatically suggested in photo tags can disable the feature by adjusting Facebook privacy settings, according to the engineer.

Google first took the algorithms of facial recognition mainstream via its online and offline photo album management tool, Picasa. – AFP