iPhoto is a great tool for managing photos. The most recent update to iPhoto ‘08 allows you even greater control over organizing photos into events. But what happens when you want to specify who is in the picture? Tagging the photos is an option, but that can get messy and time consuming fairly fast. If iPhoto just doesn’t give you the organizational options you want, then MemoryMiner may be just what you’re looking for! Read on for more on MemoryMiner and a chance to win a license!

MemoryMiner is a photo management tool that allows you to categorize your photos in two specific ways: by people and by places. Adding photos is as easy as choosing to have your iPhoto library imported, adding selected photos from the media browser, or dragging and dropping from the desktop or a folder.

Organizing your photos by people is achieved by a method similar to “tagging” people in Facebook photos. You simply select the person with a resizable box and then tag them apporiately. This is great for photos of family and friends as it allows you to keep track of who is in what picture. Then, you can choose through the list of people you’ve input and see all the photos that they appear in. What’s more, you can categorize people by family, friends, and more and even tag them across stages of their life! Looking for that photo of grandma when she was your age? It’s as easy as choosing grandma from your “People” list and checking it out.

Getting the people into MemoryMiner is another story. It takes a bit of time up front to popularize the list with all the people you’d like to include. Adding the initial name/photo is easy if you’ve got everyone in your Address Book - just drag them from Address Book over (though some form of importing within the program would have been nice). Once there, add some additional details if you please and you’re ready to go.

Organizing your photos by place is just as easy. Create the location by entering the specific address or general area and MemoryMiner’s integration with Google Maps instantly finds the place and you’re ready to tag. Drag the place onto the photo(s) you want and there you have it. Now, you are able to filter you photos by people, location, or both. The integration between the two is nice. For example, I can click on my friend Ben who I’ve labeled in several pictures across my collection. A quick click later and I’m presented with a map showing flags of all the locations that Ben is tagged in. Pretty cool.

So there you have it. Your photos can now be organized by people, place, and time in a more intuitive fashion than possible with iPhoto. It’s difficult to describe everything MemoryMiner does in just words. I could use pictures and videos of my own, but there is a great collection of videos over at MemoryMiner’s video gallery. I strongly recommend checking those out to get a bigger grasp on what MemoryMiner can do for you. Overall, MemoryMiner can be quite useful. It’s a very powerful application and I cannot give justice to all of its features in this brief review. To explore all it has to offer, I strongly suggest watching the videos and downloading it and giving it a try. You can try it out for 15 days to see what it can do for you. All in all, I like MemoryMiner. I like what it does and I like the idea that it strives to fulfill. I do, however, think it falls short in being easily used. I’m not quite sure what it is about it, but I think I’d like to see an updated interface that comes closer to that of iPhoto. It’s a great tool with powerful sorting options, but I found in using it that I wish it had a cleaner overall look to it. At this point I’m indecisive at best on whether or not I’d find MemoryMiner more useful than iPhoto at this point. A more streamlined interface could do a lot for me though.

MemoryMiner can be purchased for $45 from http://www.memoryminer.com/. And, of course, the gracious folks over at MemoryMiner have donated a license to give away to one lucky reader who comments on this post with some feedback, positive or negative, on MemoryMiner. Winners will be announced on May 16. [Winner announced]

The Breakdown:

Pro’s: Great management software for pictures. Allows for easy categorization of pictures by people, places, and times. Allows you to create a story surrounding your pictures and gives them more meaning and context

Con’s: Interface isn’t as clean and intuitive as it could be. I feel that an updated interface is needed.

The Verdict: If you’ve got a lot of pictures and need more/easier organization than iPhoto allows then MemoryMiner is for you. The price is worth it for those who like to keep their pictures organized, but it may be a bit expensive for the casual user.