With 'Photos of You,' Instagram adds Facebook-style tagging

Stealing a page from the playbook of its corporate parent, Instagram is introducing a tagging function called "Photos of You." 

The whole thing is pretty straightforward: After you've posted a picture to Instagram, you can tap or click on the photo and – à la Facebook – enter the names of the subjects. Other users will see those tags. Don't want to be tagged? Thankfully, there's also a notification and review process; unless you approve an image, it won't appear on your profile. 

"Photos are memories of the people, places and moments that mean the most to us," reps for Instagram wrote today on the company blog. "We have always sought to give you simple and expressive ways to bring the stories behind your photos to life. Your captions and hashtags capture the 'what?' and your Photo Map answers the 'where?' but until today we’ve never quite been able to answer the 'who?' " 

It's worth noting that the "You" in the Photos of You appellation doesn't just apply to people. It also applies to things – you can tag a restaurant, a book, or your sneakers. For Instagram aficionados – the kind that chronicle every cool object that crosses their path – this will be welcome news indeed. And as Mike Isaac notes over at All Things D, it will also be welcome news for the marketing departments at companies across the world.

Photos of You, he writes, "essentially gives a brand the ability to crowdsource photos of its products – likely put to use – from the millions of people who are on Instagram and taking pictures all the time. So, basically, if I’m Nike, I could potentially get tons of free content for my 'Photos of You' tab, all courtesy of the rest of Instagram."

The Platform, he adds, is "potentially a boon for brands who want to bulk up their stream of content with minimal work." 

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