How to Stop Photo Tagging on Facebook

Remember that time you were really drunk and thought it would be funny to lift your shirt over your head (to show off your fancy new tattoo), and then someone took a picture... and then they posted it on Facebook... and then someone else tagged you so everyone you know got to see it? Yeah, me too. That was hi-lar-ious.

Well, I probably shouldn’t tell you this because it’ll mean I won’t get to see any more of those gut busters, but there’s a way you can prevent this from happening. I know you untagged yourself when you finally logged in and got a chance to see it, but unfortunately, that was three days after it was posted, so it was sufficiently shared and commented on. In your little world, you could say this thing went viral.

Okay, so here’s how it’s done (it’s actually pretty simple):

1. Click the little arrow next to the Home button to see a dropdown menu.

2. Select “Privacy Settings”

3. Next to “How tags work,” hit “edit settings”

a. “Timeline review” controls whether friends are allowed to tag you in a conversation. If you enable it, you get to review all tags before they’re posted on your wall (they still can be posted elsewhere, though, so this setting doesn’t really do much for your privacy)

b. “Tag review” controls whether friends are allowed to tag you in photos. If you enable this feature, you’ll get a notification when a friend wants to tag you. You can either approve or deny the request. If you approve it, your friends and your friend’s friends can see the tag and it’ll appear on your Timeline.

c. “Tag suggestions” is Facebook’s facial recognition software. Pretty snazzy, huh? In theory, it’ll recognize you from a picture that one of your friends posted and suggest that you be tagged. You can completely turn this off if you don’t like the idea.