Abstract: An interactive electronic picture organization and display system stores pictures that include images of users' relatives and/or friends and enables the user to crop the images from the pictures into portraits of varying intimacy or social closeness values. The cropped portraits are stored with identification information and age indices and with specified preferred social proximities for the various individuals. Family trees are generated showing portraits of family tree members with appropriate age indices and preferred social closeness indices and are modified by simply mouse-clicking on displayed portraits. Collections of portraits of selected individuals exemplarily of different generations with an average generational age difference or the same age index (all as children, all as parents or grandparents, etc.) may be displayed. Life stories can be developed, collated to portraits of different age indices.