Facebook to suggest friends to tag in users photos

A woman checks a Facebook page for the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, for the Auschwitz Museum, in Warsaw, Poland, Oct. 15, 2009. The Auschwitz museum has launched a page on the Internet based Facebook site, in the hope of reaching young people, offering information but also an opportunity for discussion with the participation of the museum staff. (AP Photo/Alik Keplicz)

Facebook will try to make it easier to identify friends in photos uploaded to the social networking site by using facial recognition software to suggest people that users may want to tag.

In a blog post Wednesday, Facebook engineer Justin Mitchell said the new tag-suggestions feature will match new photos to others that people have already been tagged in. Similar photos will be grouped and the software will let users know who it thinks is in the shots.

Palo Alto-based Facebook already offers a way to tag one person in a group of photos, and it hopes this will add more simplicity to the process.

Tag suggestions will be rolled out in the U.S. in the coming weeks. Users who don’t want their name suggested can use the site’s privacy settings to turn the feature off.

Mitchell said over 100 million tags are linked to photos on Facebook daily.