What if Facebook photos could tag themselves? Now they can, with the new Photo Finder application from Faces.com. I’ve been playing around with this app for a little while now, and my appreciation for it grows with each use. My private beta access for Photo Finder couldn’t have come at a better time, since I just returned from the SXSW conference in Austin, TX. I saw a lot of people there, and met even more. That’s a lot of photo-tagging to do, for not only the people I’m already friends with on Facebook, but for the new acquaintances I have yet to connect with online.

What Photo Finder does is go through your photos and the photos of your friends to find everyone in your Facebook social graph. You can set Photo Finder up to automatically tag you in your photos as well as your friends’ photos where you’ve made appearances. And the facial recognition used for this application is pretty darn good.

Even in photos where I’m making odd facial expressions, or are turned to the side, Photo Finder has been able to identify my mug. You can improve Photo Finder by approving and un-approving photo tags, as well as by tagging photos where its technology was unable to determine who’s face is featured in a photo. If you’d like to keep tabs on photos your friends are being auto-tagged in, you can add them to Photo Finder and mark them on your watch list.

The downside for me in participating in Photo Finder’s private beta is that I was unable to add many friends for testing purposes. Now that Photo Finder is broadening access to its application, I look forward to testing it out some more. But the biggest downside for the Photo Finder application itself is the limitations dealing with Facebook’s integration options. The tags that appear on photos used in the Photo Finder app are indeed only visible to others that have added this application.

So auto-tags or manual tags will not appear anywhere else on Facebook photos. That’s a relief to some, given the privacy settings they’ve applied to their personal profile. And even for new user adoption purposes, the need to go through and un-tag any unwanted auto-tags on photos would be a tedious task if these auto-tags merely took over your existing Facebook albums.

But if there were a way to provide deeper integration with Facebook photo albums, I’d be keen to hear about it. Connecting with users via photo albums is one of the easiest ways to leverage one’s Facebook social graph, and having such a hands-off application do some of the heavy lifting for me enables me to spend my time more efficiently. If you’d like to try it out, Faces.com has given us 100 invites to pass along.