I succeeded in installing the discontinued "Windows Live Photo Gallery" on Win7, despite M$ efforts to burn down all old pre-Win10 tents.
On Win both Picasa (also discontinued), Lightroom (non-cloud also discontinued), and various open source alternatives are less polished and slower than Photo Gallery. I will try out Darktables 2.4.
The cool thing of Windows Live Photo Gallery is that everything is saved back to the file. If you tag a photo (even hierarchy tags like Places/City/NewYorkCity) the tag is stored also in the photo file, so when you copy somewhere else, all metadata (EXIF, XMP, IPC) is still there. And all photos are NOT-imported to a central database. So you can organize the photos like you want and Photo Gallery just indexes the folders and stores thumbnails and metadata in a central database file for fast viewing and searching. Most a
alternatives to a Photo Gallery want to import all photos to a special directory or even to a central database (see Picasa, and Lightroom) which is like iTunes where all your metadata like the 5 star rating sits then in a central database - that is soooo wrong!! - instead of storing the changes back to the photo files.
On Win both Picasa (also discontinued), Lightroom (non-cloud also discontinued), and various open source alternatives are less polished and slower than Photo Gallery. I will try out Darktables 2.4.
The cool thing of Windows Live Photo Gallery is that everything is saved back to the file. If you tag a photo (even hierarchy tags like Places/City/NewYorkCity) the tag is stored also in the photo file, so when you copy somewhere else, all metadata (EXIF, XMP, IPC) is still there. And all photos are NOT-imported to a central database. So you can organize the photos like you want and Photo Gallery just indexes the folders and stores thumbnails and metadata in a central database file for fast viewing and searching. Most a alternatives to a Photo Gallery want to import all photos to a special directory or even to a central database (see Picasa, and Lightroom) which is like iTunes where all your metadata like the 5 star rating sits then in a central database - that is soooo wrong!! - instead of storing the changes back to the photo files.