Of Keywords and Objects

A core strength of MemoryMiner is that it uses actual objects, rather than keywords, to represent people and places. Why does this matter? Some people have asked “why not just use keywords to represent people or places?” Of course, you could do this. However, if you’re going to take the time to annotate (or “tag”) your photos (which is obviously a great thing) why not get the most for your efforts?

It takes virtually no more time to associate an object representing a person or place to your photos, then it does to use a plain text string. Unlike a piece of text, an object representing a person can be told when the person was born, and thus, as is the case in MemoryMiner, fetch photos corresponding a specific period (e.g. “teenager”) in a person’s life. Similarly, an object representing a place can be used to retrieve the latitude and longitude given something like a street address. Objects are smart, keywords, considerably less so.

Now, there are plenty of people who have taken the time to carefully apply keywords to their photos using any number of tools such as iPhoto, iView Media, Aperture, Lightroom, etc. Wouldn’t it be great if we could do something in MemoryMiner to take advantage of this work? Something that would let one easily “map” a keyword to a MemoryMiner Person or Place so that on import, if such a matching keyword were found, do the linking automatically for you.

Sounds like that could be an interesting new addition to an upcoming release!

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