With 'Photos of You,' Instagram adds Facebook-style tagging

Instagram's new 'Photos of You' feature works very much like the tagging function on Facebook. 

|
Instagram
The 'Photos of You' feature allows Instagram users to add tags to uploaded images.

Stealing a page from the playbook of its corporate parent, Instagram is introducing a tagging function called "Photos of You." 

The whole thing is pretty straightforward: After you've posted a picture to Instagram, you can tap or click on the photo and – à la Facebook – enter the names of the subjects. Other users will see those tags. Don't want to be tagged? Thankfully, there's also a notification and review process; unless you approve an image, it won't appear on your profile. 

"Photos are memories of the people, places and moments that mean the most to us," reps for Instagram wrote today on the company blog. "We have always sought to give you simple and expressive ways to bring the stories behind your photos to life. Your captions and hashtags capture the 'what?' and your Photo Map answers the 'where?' but until today we’ve never quite been able to answer the 'who?' " 

It's worth noting that the "You" in the Photos of You appellation doesn't just apply to people. It also applies to things – you can tag a restaurant, a book, or your sneakers. For Instagram aficionados – the kind that chronicle every cool object that crosses their path – this will be welcome news indeed. And as Mike Isaac notes over at All Things D, it will also be welcome news for the marketing departments at companies across the world.

Photos of You, he writes, "essentially gives a brand the ability to crowdsource photos of its products – likely put to use – from the millions of people who are on Instagram and taking pictures all the time. So, basically, if I’m Nike, I could potentially get tons of free content for my 'Photos of You' tab, all courtesy of the rest of Instagram."

The Platform, he adds, is "potentially a boon for brands who want to bulk up their stream of content with minimal work." 

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to With 'Photos of You,' Instagram adds Facebook-style tagging
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0502/With-Photos-of-You-Instagram-adds-Facebook-style-tagging
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe