Back in 1982, 19-year-old five buddies — John Wardlaw, Mark Rumer, Dallas Burney, John Molony, and John Dickson — went on vacation to Copco Lake in California and snapped a group photo (seen above). Since then, they’ve embarked on the same vacation every 5 years, staying at the same cabin, sitting on the same bench, and snapping the same photo (with identical poses and all). They’re 48-years-old now, and the tradition is still going strong.
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After amassing 626 friends on Facebook two years ago, Tanja Hollander began to wonder how many of them were actually friends in the conventional sense. She then set out to answer the question by meeting each one of them and photographing them in their homes. The portraits are published on a website set up for the project, titled The Facebook Portrait Project, and each photo includes some information about the subject and their relationship to Hollander.
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Canon’s latest compact cameras at CES this year have some fancy new facial recognition features that assist in portrait shots. Up to 12 people can be stored in the camera. Simply snap a photo of your friends face, provide the friend’s name (and birthday if you wish), and the camera will recognize your friend from that point forward. In group shots, the camera will give your friends’ faces preferential treatment, making sure that they’re properly in focus and exposed.
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Tagging friends in massive group photographs is about to get a whole lot easier. Facebook has just announced “tag suggestions”, which uses facial recognition technology to automatically group together photographs that have the same face in them.

Because photos are such an important part of Facebook, we want to be sure you know exactly how tag suggestions work: When you or a friend upload new photos, we use face recognition software—similar to that found in many photo editing tools—to match your new photos to other photos you’re tagged in. We group similar photos together and, whenever possible, suggest the name of the friend in the photos. [#]

While many people will probably opt for the old fashioned tagging method to have more control over the process, this feature will undoubtedly save many users a good deal of time. The feature will begin rolling out to users in the US over the next few weeks.