Most photographers view images as a single entity, a moment in time that's independent from other images, but for a good number of shooters their photographs are part of a larger chain of events. Documentary photographers, historians, researchers and more use photographs as a means to document a series of events or a continuous flow of time. For these photographers, there's MemoryMiner, a $45 application that seeks to make photographs part of a string of connected events and people.

Working with metadata information in your images (from photos in iPhoto or Aperture or Lightrroom) MemoryMiner creates searchable indexes of people and places, allowing you to automatically filter and view your images according to people or places. It's a smart way to look at photographs and it's a set of tools I wish were more easily available inside most of the photographic programs already, as it's something that reflects the way that many photographers think, but few programs behave.

For example, if I tag all of my photographs on trips to San Francisco properly I could make a SmartAlbum in Aperture or iPhoto to find those images, but what happens to the shots that I took when I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and shot from Marin? They wouldn't show up in my San Francisco album and I'd quite possibly forget about them.

With MemoryMiner my IPTC tags of Marin automatically generate a places search, which allows me to find all the photos tagged with Marin. I don't have to think about it, it happens automatically. It's also possible to quickly add geotagging information and to see the images on Google maps. Click on the places link for Marin, locate it using GPS data and then all photos with Marin will get tagged with the same location data.

MemoryMiner also automatically snags contact information from my metadata and allows me to add it to photographs, which is great for photographers documenting anything from their children to a family documentary.

Photographs are more powerful when you can relate them to each other and MemoryMiner seems to be the first successful attempt to derive useful context-based information from the metadata that photographers in the digital age have been taught to enter into their photos. It's good to be able to really get meaningful value from this data.

The program is Mac only and a free trial is available along with copious screencasts and tutorials at memoryminer.com