MemoryMiner Tries to Make Your iLife More Meaningful
11:54 pm, December 9th, 2008, Pete Mortensen
At a talk in San Francisco tonight, I encountered a very cool (relatively) new OS X app called MemoryMiner. Basically, it takes all of your photos, your address book, and Google Maps to create interesting, shareable stories with friends and family. The most important piece of the app is its ability to quickly tag a portion of an image, much as Facebook and Flickr do, then associate those pieces of data back to your wider social network — over the course of time. It’s explicitly designed to allow you to tag a person at different points in their lifetime, so you can track and associate your family’s history over the course of centuries, if you have the documents to support it.
It’s currently in version 1.85 (available for a 15-day trial or $45), and creator John Fox tells me version 2.0 is well on its way, as is a social tool to track your personal geographic history compared to others. Having played around with the app for a few hours now, I will say that the program is really great at tagging and adding in new people to my MemoryMiner people file. In a few minutes, I had clips of pictures and names with all the people I wanted to. Unfortunately, for those whose birth dates I didn’t know (most of them), I had no ability to track their photos over their lifetimes. But it largely works as advertised.
Unfortunately, it has some pretty basic, pretty show-stopping limitations for the time-being. I couldn’t get it to import my iPhoto 08 Library, so that’s a huge portion of my memories that aren’t included right now. Even more troublingly, the program lacks the basic functionality to rotate photos so they’re in the correct orientation. Or, if it’s there, I just couldn’t locate it, which would almost be worse
Still, it’s a program with considerable potential. I could even imagine the company setting up a service to scan, upload, and tag archival photos so they can be associated and studied by users at home. I can just see the genealogy lovers getting way into this. Maybe in version 2.0.
Posted by Pete Mortensen in Macintosh, Opinions, Reviews, Software | Comment on this article
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I’m doing something like this using iPhoto and Bullstorm’s Keyword Manager but the Export option on MemoryMiner makes this a killer app.
Themes? Integration with iWeb? Integration with Geneology apps? GEDCOM?
What about Documents? PDFs should be in there too!
Definite potential here.
Jay, on December 10th, 2008 at 12:39 am
Hi Folks:
First off, many thanks for the kind words and great feedback. As the creator of MemoryMiner, it really does mean a lot to me. A couple of points:
* The current shipping version is 1.86, which among other things contains a newer version of the iMedia browser (http://www.karelia.com/imedia) that supports iPhoto 8, including Events.
* GEDCOM (as well as Google KML import has been in there for a long time now. Additional screen movies showing these features can be found here:
http://memoryminer.com/help/video_gallery.html
* You can attach arbitrary files/links (e.g. PDF, audio/video, URL’s, etc.) to any photo to add depth and context
* MemoryMiner has great Flickr upload support (including geodata, tags, and converting selection markers to Flickr Notes)
* MemoryMiner works great with PulpMotion (for making video animations based on the annotations created in MemoryMiner. More info here:
http://www.memoryminer.com/pulpmotionbundle/
* A video of a presentation on MemoryMiner that talks about the ideas behind it, and where it’s going in the future:
http://www.vimeo.com/1275905
* A blog about Memory Lab, a permanent exhibit at the Magnes Museum built around MemoryMiner:
http://musematic.net/?p=516
Those in interested in the upcoming beta of MemoryMiner 2.0 can email beta at memoryminer dot com.
Best regards,
John
John Fox, on December 10th, 2008 at 9:58 am