MemoryMiner - New Mac Photo App

John Fox used to develop enterprise digital asset management solutions for Webware Corporation (acquired by Clearstory Systems in 2003) where he was CTO. He has broght this experience to MemoryMiner, a new Macintosh application published by his new San Francisco-based company, GroupSmarts.

MemoryMiner is off to a great start, winning the Best of Show award at the recent Macworld Conference.

Even though MemoryMiner is still a 1.0 product, and is Mac only - it shows great promise and is jam packed full of some very innovative features. I bought an iMac G5 last fall mostly to do video editing but was not blown away by iPhoto. After playing with the MemoryMiner demo for 15 minutes I went and got my credit card (GroupSmarts is offering a $15 discount on the $60 price until 1/31/06).

MemoryMiner is all about telling stories with you pictures (which is one of the major reasons we take them in the first place!). It integrates seamlessly with iPhoto and automatically syncs with your photo library. As anyone who has tried to publish a photobook, one of the biggest challenges the storyteller faces is selecting and organizing the photos you want from all of the photos you have. This is where MemoryMiner really shines - in making it easy to tag your pictures with a focus on people and places. There's nice integration with mapping of places and then your photos tagged to those places that reminds me of GeoSnapper.

Once you have tagged and selected the photos for your stories you can use MemoryMiner's built-in tools to create a slide show (with a nice Ken Burns effect) or you can export your story as XML to use in other applications (I've yet to try this but it looks very interesting). Right now the "authoring" aspects of the app seem thin but I'm sure there will be more options in the future.

John says a web service to connect MemoryMiner's and a Windows version is in the works. This is a great start for an app that really gets how people with collections of photos over time want to organize them to unlock their enjoyment potential.