Tag Archives: idea

IDEA: automatically untag facebook photos

Perhaps this will never reach implementation stage, but here’s a nifty idea: automatically untag yourself from facebook photos. I remember the photo tags section of the API having a delete function. It looks like this is no longer the case. So I can’t exactly put this in a script to run as a cron job.

However we can still probably scrape the page and click the link programmatically. First step would be to query the facebook photo tag API and get a list of photos where you’re tagged. The list contains a link to each photo in facebook. From here we have to options.

  1. Click on the “remove tag” button and record the http request. Reverse engineer it to see if we can replay with with a unique ID of another photo. If that is the case then great, the only thing that’s stopping us are session cookies.
  2. Option 2 is just to click “remove tag” button via some software. People already had ideas like that but the testing software package Selenium comes to mind. It can find the “remove tab” by itself and click it.

I was about to implement this idea, but realized that my privacy settings already allow only me to see photos that I’m tagged in. So this effort would be for vanity since people can’t see my photos anyway.

If any of you would actually like to see this done hit my up on twitter @pavel987 and I’ll probably be motivated enough to write it.