Twitter Takes Page From Facebook, Adds Photo Tagging

Heads up, Twitter users. Your photos are about to get a lot more social-friendly.

The micro-blogging service this week updated its iPhone and Android apps to enable photo tagging. This means you can now identify the people in photos you post to the site, without eating away at the character count in your tweet.

'Tagging people in a picture makes conversations around photos fun and easy,' Twitter software engineer César Puerta wrote in a blog post Wednesday. 'And tagging doesn't affect character count in the tweet - you can tag up to 10 people in a photo and still have all 140 characters at your disposal, making it easier to connect with your friends.'

To tag someone, all you need to do is click 'Who's in this photo?' after you add your image, then type the person's full name or @username, and tap Done. When someone else tags you in a photo, you'll receive a notification.

If you're worried that the addition of photo tagging will lead to a whole mess of unflattering images of you winding up online, don't fret. You can adjust who can tag you from the Settings menu.

Meanwhile on the photo front, you can also now share up to four images in a single tweet, instead of just one at a time. When you share multiple images, Twitter will automatically create a mini-collage. You can tap on one of the thumbnails to see the full image, then slide through all the photos in the group.

The ability to upload multiple photos is starting to roll out today on iPhone, and will arrive on Android and Twitter.com soon, though you can view tweets with several photos regardless of the platform you're on.

To get these new features, grab the latest version of the Twitter app from the App Store or Google Play.

Tagging, of course, takes a page from Facebook, which has also adopted a number of Twitter features, from mentions to hashtags.