Good-ol' Valve always keeps interesting stuff hidden for those, who will eventually discover it.

Today we'll be talking about yet another undocumented Steam feature that lets you have more than one tagged users on your screenshot page.

From what I understand, the point of tagging users on your screenshots is to let them know you've captured their lose, or them acting foolish, or whatever. The end point is that they'll see themselves from YOUR point of view on their activity feed, and perhaps, will angrily demand you to remove the screenshot.


Well, you've been warned, so let's go!

This part is pretty much obvious. You need to take a screenshot.

I'm too lazy to teach you how to take Steam in-game screenshots, so I'm going to quote the "Sharing Screenshots" section of Jimo's "Contributing Screenshots, Artwork and Videos to the Steam Community" guide.

Originally posted by Jimo:

Screenshots you've taken within a game using the Steam screenshot key can be uploaded using the screenshot uploader tool. By default this button is bound to "F12", and can be edited within the Steam settings.

Open the Steam client and click on "View" and then "Screenshots" at the top to access the screenshot uploader.

Once you've clicked on "Screenshots" the screenshot uploader window will appear. This window will display a categorized list of every screenshot you've taken within a game.

By the way, if you're new to Steam, you should definitely check out other Jimo's guides. They will help you to get started.

Once you've taken a screenshot, the next step will be modifying the screenshots.vdf file on your computer.

Some trivia here: Steam stores screenshots in the "userdata\<accountid>\760\remote\<appid>\screenshots" of your Steam installation directory. All the metadata (information) about your screenshots is stored in "userdata\<accountid>\760\screenshots.vdf"

By editing this file we can manipulate screenshots metadata such as date it was taken, location (map), and of course, tagged users.

First you'll need to know the filename of the screenshot you're going to modify. That's a rather simple thing to do. Just open the Screenshot Uploader window in Steam (Steam => View => Screenshots).

Then find the screenshot and click "Show on the disk" button.



In the screenshots folder find the screenshot you want to tag users on and remember or copy (that's better) it's name.



After you've copied the file name, navigate three folders up, so "userdata\<accountid>\760" is where you are now.

You'll see two files: "remotecache.vdf" and "screenshots.vdf". Open the latter one in your favorite text editor (I prefer Notepad++[notepad-plus-plus.org]— it's free, feature-rich and generally just a reliable piece of software!).



Now that you have "screenshots.vdf" open, hit CTRL+F, or whatever is bound to the search function of your text editor. Paste the filename you've previously copied and hit the "Find" button.



The search may take some time, if your "screenshots.vdf" is big enough. Soon, mostly instantly, the text editor will jump to the section of the "screenshots.vdf" file, which contains the string we're looking for.

That's how it looks in our case:

Although there are a lot of settings you can tweak (and even upload custom screenshots), they all are out of the scope of our tutorial today. We're interested specifically in this section:

Note: that this section may be missing if you haven't pointed your in-game crosshair at someone. In this case just create it.

This section contains SteamID64 of those who are included in your screenshot.

Since we know that 64-bit SteamIDs are used to identify users in the screenshot, one can guess, that determining the SteamID64 of someone you want to tag and then pasting it to the code above will work. If you figured that out on your own—brilliant! Otherwise, well, follow the tutorial then.

In my case I wanted to tag two users on my screenshot. We were in the same match at the time, so I went to my Recently Played With list, found the people involved, and opened their Steam profiles.

In some cases people may not set up a Custom URL (steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/id/) for their profiles, and that makes our task a little bit easier, since the SteamID64 will be the large number after the steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/profiles/ part. If there is a custom URL set, there are two ways to find out the SteamID64:

• The first one is to append ?xml=1 to the profile link and copy the large number in the beginning of the page.
  
• The second method involves copying the profile link and pasting it to a special site, such as steamrep.com, which lets you see detailed information about Steam profiles.

Now that you've got the large number called SteamID64, just paste it into the "taggedusers" section. Don't forget to increment the number before the SteamID64 (the starting number will always be 0).

After all these manipulations, the "taggedusers" section should look like this:

Now save the file and exit out of Steam (not just close it, but completely quit the program: Steam => Exit).

After logging back to your Steam account, open the Screenshot Uploader window once again, find the screenshot you've modified, give it a name, set it's privacy settings and press the "Upload" button.

Here's the end result:
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=747645616

If you open the screenshot and look carefully at the right part of your screen, you'll notice the "Users on this screenshot" will contain not one, but two users!



And here's what people you've tagged will see on their community activity feed page:



Exactly what we wanted to accomplish.

Congratulations! You've just learned how to use yet another undocumented Steam feature.

I hope you've liked my guide! Make sure to follow me on Steam and/or Twitter.

Thanks to Wikipedia for the STOP sign and Jimo for his guides.

P.S. If you wish to translate this guide, don't hesitate to contact me! Just make a comment here and add me to your friends list. I'm always glad that my work is appreciated (as well, as yours).