Instagram Now Lets You Tag People and Brands in Photographs

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One of the key features afforded by the fusion of photo sharing and social networking is people tagging. On services such as Facebook and Flickr, adding information to identify the people in photos is as easy as clicking/tapping a face and telling the service who that subject is.

Instagram this morning announced that it’s joining in on the people-tagging fun. The company has released a new “Photos of You” feature that makes tagging a person as easy as adding a hashtag.

Instagram says that this new feature helps answer the question of “who?”:

Photos are memories of the people, places and moments that mean the most to us. 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?”.

Here’s a video introducing “Photos of You”:

Only the creators of photographs can tag the people in their photos. The feature isn’t limited to people — anything in your photo can be tagged and associated with an Instagram account. Tag your filtered photo of your morning coffee with @Starbucks, for example.

As you can probably tell, this new feature is a big step in helping brands promote their presence on the service, which may mean more money-making opportunities later down the road for Instagram.

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Each Instagram user profile now has a new section called “Photos of You.” This page aggregates all the photographs on the photo sharing network in which your account is tagged. You’ll be notified upon each tag, and people who are concerned about privacy can adjust their privacy settings so that tagged photos must be approved prior to showing up on a “Photos of You” page.

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To get started with tagging your photographs, download the latest version of Instagram from the Apple App Store or from Google Play.

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