Know What Facebook Can See Inside Your Photographs

When you upload any photograph to your Facebook account, they look at the actual content of the photograph and try to determine what objects and scenes are inside the image. You may not have added any description, yet Facebook can determine what that picture is all about.

Whether you are having a pizza, enjoying the sun on a beach, playing with your dog or spending an evening with friends, Facebook can accurately figure it out from the photo itself. They internally use these machine generated captions to make your pictures more accessible to blind users.

Facebook Tags

Facebook Computer Vision Tags

If you are curious to know what information Facebook visual recognition algorithms have found in your own pictures, here’s an easy way to view that data.

  1. Open any photograph on the Facebook website and click the thumbnail to view the enlarged version of the image.
  2. Right-click the image and choose Inspect to open the Chrome Dev Tools. This trick would work across all modern browsers since they have developer tools built-in.
  3. Look at the alt attribute of the image tag and you’ll find the description of the image as seen by Facebook (video tutorial).

PS:If the img tag is not visible in developer tool, you may need to expand the parent div tag.

Video Tutorial - Facebook Image Tags

Facebook’s computer vision tags cover multiple concepts including food, objects (e.g., eyeglasses), people’s expression (are they smiling?), sports, nature (sky, mountains), and more. The best part - if you are in a group photograph, Facebook can accurately tell you the exact number of people in the frame.

A Github user has created a Google Chrome extension that takes away all the manual work and overlays the tags on the pictures without you having to hunt inside the developer tool.

Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory

0

Awards & Titles

Digital Inspiration has won several awards since it's launch in 2004.

Google Developer Expert

Google Developer Expert

Google awarded us the Google Developer Expert award recogizing our work in Google Workspace.

ProductHunt Golden Kitty

ProductHunt Golden Kitty

Our Gmail tool won the Lifehack of the Year award at ProductHunt Golden Kitty Awards in 2017.

Microsoft MVP Alumni

Microsoft MVP Alumni

Microsoft awarded us the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) title for 5 years in a row.

Google Cloud Champion

Google Cloud Champion

Google awarded us the Champion Innovator title recognizing our technical skill and expertise.

Email Newsletter

Sign up for our email newsletter to stay up to date.

We will never send any spam emails. Promise.