Patent ID: 8874580

Claim:
A file management machine to perform file management operations associated with a plurality of files through user action, the file management machine comprising: a first computer configured as a file management server to communicate through an electronic communications network with a plurality of remotely located user computers associated with a plurality of member and visitor users and configured as the user computers, each user computer being remote from the file management server, the file management server having at least a processor and memory; and a computer program on the file management server and stored in the memory, the computer program comprising a set of instructions that, when executed by the file management server, cause the file management server to perform operations comprising: generating a member account for a member user, causing display of an icon palette to the member user on one of the remotely located user computers, the icon palette having a palette boundary and icons representing a plurality of predetermined categories representing notable events in a life of the member user, assigning one of the plurality of files to at least one of the plurality of predetermined categories responsive to member user action whereby dragging and dropping one of the plurality of files onto a selected one of the icons on the icon palette causes the file management server to execute the operations of: extracting a copy of the file from a memory element associated with the respective remotely located user computer and transferring the copy of the file through the electronic communications network to a memory element associated with the file management server, and establishing a relation between the file and the respective predetermined category represented by the selected icon, repeating the operation of the assigning for each other of the plurality of files to thereby define a plurality of member uploaded files, associating each of the plurality of member uploaded files with one or more of a plurality of albums responsive to member user selection thereof, generating a plurality of visitor accounts for a corresponding plurality of visitors, each visitor account of the plurality of visitor accounts associated with the member account and configured by the member user to provide each respective different visitor with custom visitor access permissions, and assigning the visitor access restrictions to each of the plurality of visitors through custom visitor access configuration of the plurality of visitor accounts, each custom visitor access configuration providing member user-selected access to one or more subsets of the plurality of member uploaded files according to one or more of the following bases: a file-by-file basis, an album-by-album basis, and a category-by-category basis.