There are a lot of pictures of me on Facebook, most of which were uploaded by other people.

For self-presentation purposes (especially because I don’t want unflattering pictures of me being easily accessible to others) I have untagged a fair amount of photos uploaded by my friends. However, once I untag the photos, they are lost to me, even if they still exist on Facebook. That’s not what I want.

Dear product developers at Facebook, you really need to make a private tagging system where I can keep tags of myself but have them private so that I (or whatever privacy setting I have them to be) can still see them. Currently, I have to download the picture and upload it with privacy settings on Flickr in order to keep an archive of pictures that have my face. I’ve lost so many photos that I untagged immediately for the sake of impression management but then still wanted for my personal archive. 

If Facebook is trying to figure out how to keep users from migrating to another social network site, they really need to make this feature, because if you think about it, moving to a new site with all your friends is a relatively easy thing to do. Think of My Space as an example. However, content is a more difficult thing to carry. Content is baggage. It is hard to leave content behind. It is even harder to leave content behind if the content is being held by someone else. Thus it is in the user’s best interest to stay on Facebook along with their friends to prevent the less of precious content, such as photos.