Surely one should be able to just tag _the album_ instead of each photo?

I always figured this constraint was kept as a happy convenience so that Facebook have a steady supply of training data for their face recognition service.

If they are shutting that service down, maybe they'll let us tag albums?

My wedding album has like 200 photos in it. I definitely had relatives who didn't want to look through them all and just asked me to send them the photos with them in it.

I doubt Facebook won't offer some unsupervised face clustering for albums, they will just remove tagging from images. Google Photos offers me pictures of distinctive people found in my gallery without giving me their names.

the ideas aren't mutually exclusive.

And then each guest has to go through every picture in the album to find the ones with them to share?

Who opted in? I certainly don't remember ever doing it, yet auto tagging has always worked for me (both when I am tagging pictures and when others are tagging me).

The opt-in is at https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=facerec -- I definitely remember intentionally opting in when it was added, and it's off on some of my throwaway accounts so I assume it wasn't auto-checked for everyone at some point.

> Who opted in?

It was one of those "by continuing to use our service(s), you are opting-in" t&C's updates.

So in short: nobody did but legally there is a box ticked.

Yes, but why tag people?

So they can see themselves in photos? So you don't have to look through all of your friends' photos to find which ones you are in and repost them yourself.

Isn't it possible to tag people even if they don't have a FB account?

You can type whatever you want as a tag, although I've never actually seen someone do this.

I guess it could just be used to annotate images, or to recall who's who for your own use, a la how people used to write everyone's names on the back of photos.