In this app a MEM is what Family Intelligence makes from a drop of photos: the strongest moments, in order, a line each, a hero, music under it, and then a version for each person in it. The .mem file is that MEM on disk. Here is what it holds, in human terms. The field names come in chapter 4.
The moments
Not every photo: the ones that carry the memory. Each has a line of prose (the owner’s story when there is one), its themes, when it was taken, and a focal point that says where to look. A voice note travels as its transcript. A video travels as the kept seconds, not the whole clip.
The order and the arc
The moments sit in sub-events (a day, an evening) and, when the author set one, an explicit order. Each moment carries an emotional weight, a value from 0 to 1, and a sensitivity. Read along the timeline, the weights draw the memory’s emotional arc: the shape a music app maps to song structure and a book maps to chapters.
The people, as roles
Nobody is named. The file says that a mother and a long-time friend are in it, which moments each appears in, and how close each role is to the owner: core, close, known or peripheral. The names stay in the owner’s archive. This is what lets a file travel without carrying anyone’s identity.
The music, and what the owner felt
Music is matched or generated from the emotional arc. The file carries which asset plays under the show and the recipe that made the track, so a player can reproduce the mood. It also carries the owner’s declared feeling for the memory, a vibe and labels, kept separate from anything observed in a photo.
How richly bound
From these fields a reader can place the memory on the Holistic Memory Scale, ten levels from Fragments (a bare artifact) to Legacy (reflected on, witnessed by others, carried forward). The level signals how much of the memory is bound in: place, people, senses, feeling, voices, other people’s angles. It is a reading of the file, not a formula inside it.
The stamp
A hash over every moment and an optional timestamp proof, so the file proves when it existed and that it has not changed since.