Automatic face detection comes to Facebook photos

Facebook added face detection to photos last night, making it faster for people to upload and edit albums.

No, it’s not full-fledged facial recognition that can identify a person, like what Israeli startup Face.com does or what Google Picasa has. It’s a very basic improvement that highlights whether faces are in a photo and lets users tag their friends.

“With this new feature, tagging is faster since you don’t need to select a face,” wrote Sam Odio, who came to Facebook through its acquisition of Divvyshot two months ago. “It’s already selected for you, just like those rectangles you see around your friends’ faces when you take a photo with a modern digital camera.”

He also revealed a few interesting stats — more than 100 million photos are uploaded every day (meaning the company is doing at least roughly 3 billion photos a month).