There is little doubt that we are all married to Facebook. The amount of content being shared online has substantially increased, with Facebook focussing on bringing together those who made offline memories online as well. That means photos, and lots of them.

Unfortunately, that also means unwanted tagging, which makes the picture show up on your profile page and pesters you with notification upon notification.

Facebook houses a facial recognition technology that analyzes photos uploaded by your friends. If it recognises you in a photo uploaded by your friend, it will automatically suggest your name, which makes it easier to tag you. Creepy as it sounds, luckily Facebook also allows users to customise this feature.

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Save yourself from notification upon notification after being tagged in other people’s Facebook photos

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Step 1: Login into your Facebook account and click Settings:

Step 2: You will now land on the General Account Settings page. On your left is another panel; find and click on the ‘Timeline and Tagging’ options in the list.

Step 3: Move into the ‘How can I manage tags people add and tagging suggestions’ section. Click the Edit button “Who sees tag suggestions when photos that look like you are uploaded.”

Another option worth configuring is “Review tags people add to your own posts before the tags appear on Facebook’ click edit, and choose ‘Enabled’ from the expanded menu and close it.

Step 4: After clicking on edit, the section expands, choose ‘No One’ from the options available.

Step 5 Choose ‘Close’ to hide the details for the setting available and to save it.

A disclaimer: changing this setting won’t prevent your friends from uploading your photographs and tagging you in them. It only disables the facial recognition technology, thereby barring automatic suggestions to tag you in an uploaded photograph.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, April 26th, 2015

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