I've been looking into some more advanced tagging methods for my photos and have found MemoryMiner (
http://www.memoryminer.com). It looks good but I don't want to have my entire collection of photos in it. So, does anyone here have and use the program? If so, what is your workflow with it? And, does it work well as a companion program to iPhoto?
Thanks in advance.
Hi:
I am the author of MemoryMiner, so I hope you don't mind me jumping in to the conversation. The core idea behind MemoryMiner is to treat your most interesting and rare photos as frames in a storyboard that are linked by People, Place and Time. As such, it's designed to be a complement to photo management tools such as iPhoto, Aperture, iView, Lightroom, etc. however, you can perfectly well use MemoryMiner as a standalone application.
The best way to get a good overview of the software is to visit this page:
http://www.memoryminer.com/mac
Here you'll find annotated screen grabs, screen movies, and examples of MemoryMiner's web export capabilities.
That said, the principal way people work with the application is to use the built-in Media Browser to visually browse the contents of their various photo libraries then drag and drop them onto the MemoryMiner Contact Sheet. The files are not copied, but instead a database link is created. You then use drag and drop actions to indicate who is in the photo (and specifically where in the photo they are), where the photo was taken, and what's going on. The critical thing to keep in mind is that you create actual People and Place objects, not just simple text "tags". For example, when you create a person in MemoryMiner, you can set their relationship to you, and their birth date. This means you can then easily search by a specific period in a person's life (e.g. teenager) using a "life wheel." Google Maps is embedded in the Places editor so that you can precisely located a place (such as a person's home) on a map using whatever portion of the address you have. You can also attach audio, video, documents, or web links onto any photo in order to add depth and context.
MemoryMiner is designed to "play well with others" so that work you've already done in other programs can be reused in MemoryMiner and vice-versa. For example, if you've added keywords to indicate the names of people and places in iPhoto, you can set up a "keyword mapping" to a MemoryMiner Person or Place so that the association is made automatically upon import.
You can see this and other similar features (such as IPTC, GEDCOM and KML metadata import, etc.) here:
http://www.memoryminer.com/help/video_gallery.html
MemoryMiner works beautifully with PulpMotion, which is a video animation software that takes advantage of the selection areas created in MemoryMiner in order to make really cool video output from panning and zooming around using the selection markers you created to guide the motion of the camera.
http://www.memoryminer.com/pulpmotionbundle
Finally, you can share MemoryMiner libraries as self-contained documents with other MemoryMiner users (on both Mac and Windows).
At any rate, hope this info helps. Feedback is always most welcome via email to info at memoryminer dot com. Support questions are answered by a friendly human being using support at memoryminer dot com.
Best regards,
John
