MemoryMiner - the ultimate photo organiser?
January 15, 2007 on 12:27 am |Categories: macintosh, mashups, social networking
Tags: application, geotagging, groupsmarts, iphoto, mac, macbreak, macintosh, macworld, mashups, memoryminer, merlin-mann, organiser, photos, social networking, tagging, video
This week saw GroupSmarts release an interesting update to their MemoryMiner social photo organiser application. MemoryMiner is a social photo organiser for Mac OS X, allowing users to tag imported photos by who appears in them (the ability to draw a marquee around a subject in a photo is somewhat similar to Facebook’s photo tagging service). Memory Miner also incorporates time-based selection, tagging and geotagging.
If you’d like to see a visual demo, check out MacBreak’s video interview with GroupSmarts [QuickTime movie, 93.6MB]. Warning: Merlin Mann present. I don’t mind him but I know that many do…
An especially interesting feature (new in the current version), is the ability to query a photo’s subject via email about some aspect of it. For example, by assigning your brother’s Address Book contact to a photo of your him and his dog you could query him automatically for the dog’s name, or some other forgotten aspect of the photo (see screenshot here). This function appears to be driven via web services, but as incorporated into MemoryMiner, they’re proprietary rather than open-access.
As I mentioned, Facebook already incorporates some of this functionality. MemoryMiner has been able to take the ideas further because of its tight integration with other system services in Mac OS X, but there’s no reason why any photo-sharing/social networking site couldn’t attempt something similar.
One interesting question is how people may export this social/spatial/time-based hybrid information to other similar systems in future. Clearly the value of it is in the linkages between the different types of information on a given entity, e.g. that a certain photo was taken at a certain place at a certain time with a certain group of people. In other words, the context of the photo.
This raises a question common to all social software hybrid applications. Is innovation ahead of the curve when developing standards for these features? Certainly, RSS photostreams including geotagging information can be done at present, but how are we to incorporate people as entities into these systems in such a way as they are transferrable? Can Great Uncle Joe become a URL?
Answers on a postcard please. Or a comment.
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Hello:
Thanks for posting about MemoryMiner. The web annotation service is the first of several web services that we will be rolling out this year, so stay tuned. It is being offered as a free public beta to MemoryMiner users starting at the end of this month. We’ve thought a lot about issues of security, which is extremeley important to everyone, I think.
I can also say is that we’ve gone to great lengths to make MemoryMiner play well with other applications and services, and will continue to do so.
I definitely agree with your point about innovation being ahead of the curve. There are lots of ways (like RSS) to deliver groups of photos across the Internet, and a few standards (such as XMP/IPTC) to embed rich metatdata in the photo file itself.
I personally think that embedding at least a subset of the metadata in the photo itself is a great idea, especially if you also embed a “phone home URL” which can answer other questions about the photo after some sort of authentication has taken place.
Best,
John
Comment by John C Fox — 15th January 2007 #
Didn’t understand this at all, but nice picture of Tommy and Tom taking their morning constitutional.
Comment by Chuffy — 15th January 2007 #
Speaking about “geotagging”: do you know locr?
locr offers the ideal solution and makes geotagging exceptionally easy. locr uses GoogleMaps with detailed maps and high-resolution satellite images. To geotag your photos just enter address, let locr search, fine-tune the marker, accept position, and done! If you don’t know the exact address simply use drag&drop to set the position.
For automatic geotagging you need a datalog GPS receiver in additon to your digital camera. The GPS receiver data and the digital camera data is then automatically linked together by the locr software. All information will be written into the EXIF header.
Use the “Show in Google Earth” button to view your photos in Google Earth.
With locr you can upload photos with GPS information in them without any further settings. In the standard view, locr shows the photo itself, plus the place it was taken. If you want to know more about the place where the photo was taken, just have at look at the Wikipedia articles which are also automatically assigned to the picture.
Have a look at http://www.locr.com.
Comment by Tom — 23rd April 2007 #