Managing photos in a post-Picasa (?) world

I like picturelife.com - especially the emails they send that show a few thumbnail size photos of where you were on this day in various previous years. However the previous photo storage/organisation web service I used closed down, so I keep photos on picturelife, my local computer and backed up to a remote storage company.

I forgot to add. Practically every one of these 130k photos is stored in a carefully maintained collection of individual folders based on date, location and camera type. Again, not something we wish to abandon.

Until you find a way to export your photos with metadata into another photo management app, you could extend the life of Win 7 by running it virtually on a computer running a newer version of Win, for example, Win 10. When the computer starts it's running Win 10. You then start https://www.virtualbox.org/, a free app from Oracle, to run Win 7 you installed there. Installing VirtualBox is slightly more complicated than most consumer Win software. Installing Win 7 inside VirtualBox is just like installing Win 7 on any machine. Getting the virtual operating system (Win 7 in this case) to play nice with the hardware can be puzzling, but there are forums that handle newbie problems.

Can you ask Picasa to store the metadata inside the photos, rather than outside in a separate database? Do you not want to migrate to Google Photos?

As far as I understand it, Google Photos is an online service with 15gb of free storage. I have 330gb of images (all of which are already online at Dropbox) plus a not especially fast internet connection. I already use it for pictures taken on my smartphone and it is very slow. Also, I think the Picasa metadata is totally specific to Picasa - filters and crops applied, starred photos, etc., so it wouldn't be much use with the program itself.

I haven't used it, but isn't Dropbox's Carousel a photo management deal? I know it's definitely for viewing and sharing. And it's already integrated with dropbox... You're half right about Google Photos. There are actually two tiers of storage, the 15gb that you refer to, and another that compresses images, but gives you totally unlimited storage. I'm currently using Google Photos and really loving it, or at least liking it more than Apple Photos. It might be worth your time to dump one folder onto the account to see how it handles. I'm not particularly serious, and I don't have anywhere near as much as 330 GB, but so far, I'm pretty impressed.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/compatibility/CompatCenter/ProductDetailsViewer?Type=Software&Name=Picasa&ModelOrVersion=3&Vendor=Google&Locale=&LastSearchTerm=&BreadcrumbPath=&TempOsid=Windows+10 says it is compatible with Win 10. I have had 10 for a month or so and I have used Picasa in that time but not extensively. You said you have other machines with Win 10 on them already? Install Picasa on one of those and add a few folders of pictures to test it out yourself. Picasa filters and crops should either be another file with the same name and "-1" appended to it or should replace the original file with the original moved to a subfolder. Picasa has probably been doing one of those things all along if you have been saving the file after cropping. a carefully maintained collection of individual folders based on date, location and camera type How much of that metadata is already part of the file? Probably quite a bit. Date and camera for sure and location can be added with some tools using the folder name. I use both Flickr and Google photos and like them both for different reasons. I really like having two different cloud backups of every single photo and I pay $0 for both. My collection is closer to 50K photos. If Picasa doesn't work for you on Win10, experiment with syncing just a few folders with both services and see how much metadata they are able to pull in and then see what they guess. It can be a little creepy! It will take time to get your whole collection uploaded, but that can run at night for several weeks until it is done.

Reliance on any cloud-based service puts you at risk of change you don't want and can't control. It's unlikely Dropbox or Flickr are going to kill off their golden geese, but Google has been quite willing to shut down services. One obvious approach is to handle everything locally. Buy one or two 1tb drives, decide on a photo management/editing tool, replicate your file structure, and copy everything from Dropbox. Two drives will provide working space, backup space, with Dropbox as the offsite backup. Tools like Lightroom often hype their ability to push your images and associated data into a "catalog" that they manage for you, but they usually also work fine with an existing file structure.

Thanks everyone. The Dropbox is a business account which inexplicably doesn't include Carousel. I will try a copy of Picasa on one of the Win10 machines. Just to add that Dropbox is a back-up - the files are also duplicated across two computers for safe-keeping.