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Matt Elliott/CNET
If you share photos of your kids on Facebook, then you might like Facebook’s new Scrapbook feature that collects the photos you share of your kids and keeps them in one place. Scrapbooks also make it easier to share photos of your kids with your partner’s Facebook friends.
A Facebook Scrapbook lets you create a photo tag for your child even if he or she isn’t on Facebook and then create a Facebook album of the photos in which he or she is tagged. If my feed is any indication, the smaller a child is, the more likely a parent is to being sharing kid photos on Facebook, starting with new parents unleashing a torrent of new baby photos, followed by photos of every milestone they hit in the first few years. And since little Junior can’t have his own Facebook page until the age of 13, a Scrapbook lets you tag Junior during his pre-Facebook-profile years.
Facebook found that 65 percent of parents tag their partner in photos of their kids in order to share those photos with their partner’s Facebook friends. With a Scrapbook, you can set up it up to co-own with your partner, which lets both of you tag your kid in photos and then have both your friends and your partner’s friends see photos of your kid when you share them. To set up a co-owned Scrapbook, you will need to be in a Facebook relationship with your partner.
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET
To create a Scrapbook from the desktop version of Facebook, go to your profile and click About. On the About page, choose Family and Relationships and then you’ll see a banner at the top to Create a Scrapbook for your Child with a blue Get Started button.
On mobile, head to your profile, tap Update Info and then tap the Get Started button.
When creating a Scrapbook, you will need to add your kid as a family member. If you are uncomfortable giving Facebook the proper name for your child, you can instead use a nickname, initials, or anything really. You then need to select how you are related, for which there are four choices: Daughter, Son, Child (gender-neutral) or Pet.
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET
After you have created a Scrapbook for your kid, you then can tag photos of him or her that you’ve previously shared. You can also tag your kid in photos that your friends shared of your kids, but only you and your partner can tag your kids in photos. All of the tagged photos are then added to the Scrapbook. You can also choose a profile picture and cover photo for a Scrapbook.
There is no facial recognition technology at work here, which means only the photos you tag are added. Scrapbooks are also designed to be created for each of your kids, but I don’t see why you couldn’t create one Scrapbook for all of your kids by calling it Kids or My Spawn and then tagging photos of any and all of your kids, which would throw them into a single Scrapbook.
Scrapbooks shouldn’t lead to an onslaught of baby and kids photos in your Facebook feed. They are simply an album that collects tagged photos as parents go about their usual business of sharing photos of their kids on Facebook. You’ll find Scrapbooks located in the Albums view for your photos.
Privacy is always a concern on Facebook and the Internet at large, particularly when it comes to children. According to Facebook, “Your child’s Scrapbook doesn’t have its own privacy setting, but the individual photos do. When people visit a Scrapbook, they’ll only see a photo if they’re included in that photo’s audience. The profile and cover photo of your child’s Scrapbook are visible to anyone who can see at least one photo in the Scrapbook.”
Facebook told TechCrunch that it hopes to let teenagers take control of the Scrapbook their parents created of them, which would let a teen remove an embarrassing photo the time he got a pea stuck in his nose as a toddler. Facebook also said it is also planning to add a subscribe button that would let, say, grandparents get alerted when new a photo of a grandkid is added to a Scrapbook.
