What’s The Proper Way To Tag Photos On Facebook?

Have you ever been tagged in a photo in which one of your eyes is closed, your hair is mussed and your makeup looks like it was applied by the Joker? Or worse, been tagged in photo taken during a drunken night out that’s now shared with everyone you know? Or worst of all, being tagged as photo evidence of a lie? If so, it sounds like someone should familiarise themselves with the etiquette of Facebook photo tagging.

Should I ever tag someone without their permission?

This may sound a bit ludditinous, but I’m going to say no, you should never tag someone without their permission. Even something as innocuous as a set of photos of a backyard BBQ might be condemning to one of the people in attendance, say, if they told their bosses that they were going to work that weekend, or if they promised to never be in the presence of an ex. The safest thing to do is to ask permission first, get it, and have the onus be on the taggee rather than the tagger, if something goes wrong.

While this rule sounds ridiculously constraining for everyday Facebook usage — and it is — you’ll undoubtedly find times where you can deviate and tag people freely. Just think of it as being safe, where spending five seconds on a Facebook message asking for permission can prevent embarrassment later on.

How can I stop people from tagging me automatically?

Easy! Facebook just rolled out new privacy controls for photo tagging, where you can approve or reject tags in photos before they show up. Unfortunately, these new Facebook features are gradually popping up in people’s accounts, so you may not have this enabled for yours yet.

You can see how and where to change this setting in the video here, starting about a minute in.

Etiquette is, by its very nature, subjective. What’s acceptable today probably wasn’t acceptable 20 years ago, and what’s unheard of right now might be commonplace in a decade. It might also be seen as pedantic to some, because if you boil it down, it’s just an arbitrary set of rules that we all abide by to make all our lives easier. So weigh in and tell us what you think about this subject. It’s one of the few times that just about everybody’s opinion is more or less as valid as everybody else’s.