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Tech Report: Instagram Unveils New Tagging Feature

SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) – Popular photo-sharing app Instagram unveiled a new feature on Thursday, Photos of You, allowing users to tag people in their pictures.

In a blog post, Instagram said that the new feature allows users to answer the question of "who." The "what" was already answered by captions and hashtags and the Photo Map took care of the "where" question.

Tech Report: Instagram Unveils New Feature

Photos of You works very much like tagging a photo of someone on Facebook. After taking a picture, users have the option to "Add People" from the Share screen. They can then tap on a person in the picture and answer the on-screen question, "Who's this?' Users have the option of either selecting the person's name from a drop down menu or searching for the person.

Users can also tag brands, such as the name of the restaurant a person might be visiting. There is one difference from what Instagram is offering – users can only tag photos that they've taken.

In terms of privacy, if your photos are public, anyone can see the photo and tag. If users post privately, the photo and tag can only be seen by those who are approved as followers. The default setting is that photos a person is tagged in automatically appear in that person's profile. But users have the option to change their settings to manually approve a photo before it becomes part of their profile.

A person can also untag themselves from a photo, and also block or report other users.

You can hear Larry Magid's Tech Report Monday through Friday at 3:50pm on KCBS All News 740AM and 106.9FM.

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