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Lyricists Lennon and McCartney may cause us to sing of "places I remember all my life," but the older we get the more foggy those memories become. Surely, there's a digital photo tool we can use to organize our images and document the meaningful flotsam and jetsam in our lives. Enter MemoryMiner. This handy utility makes sense of all of your digitally stored moments.
MemoryMiner functions like a digital scrapbook, helping you gather, annotate and connect your images to create rich photo histories. It works with any digital picture, automatically capturing the images stored in your iPhoto library, if you turn on the Preferences feature that states 'Synchronize with iPhoto Library at startup.' Alternatively, you can drag and drop images from the Finder or another photo manager app (like Photoshop CS2 $650; www.adobe.com) into its own browser window.
Various tools within the program let you identify the people and places within each picture, then search for those images by name or location. When you draw a marquee around a person in a photo, the app immediately invokes the People Picker (a.k.a. Address Book), inviting you to select an existing person or create a new Address Book entry for the selected individual. You also can annotate an image, date it and link your photos through common elements. As you enter information, MemoryMiner creates a buddy-like list so that you can search for and display all pictures associated with a particular person. A timeline setting lets you set picture selection for a specific range of dates, thus creating a time-based filter.
One standout feature in MemoryMiner is the ability to connect a name to a location on a map. You'll need an Internet connection for this to work, plus an Address Book entry identifying street and ZIP code.
MemoryMiner has limited export capabilities. It only exports images with associated annotations and maps in XML format. Nevertheless, it does offer an exciting new way to mine the memories of your mind with tools to organize, annotate and share personal and family histories.
–CAROL S. HOLZBERG
MemoryMiner v1.01: 
GroupSmarts, LLC | www.memoryminer.com | $60
Pros: Powerful utility linking digital images to Apple's iPhoto, Address Book and Mapquest maps.
Cons: No online user guide, Help file returns error message stating "oops, page not found," can't edit the relationship list, can't export images from the MemoryMiner application.
Requires: OS 10.3 or higher, G4 or better, 512MB RAM
macHOME recommends: OS 10.4 G5, 1GB RAM
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