I'm looking for an alternative to Windows Live Viewer, since its light image editing, read meta data and assign ratings easily was great, but I don't know of any way to get it run anymore since microsoft killed it.
Doesn't have to be the best alternative (since that would be your opinion) but a list of existing alternatives that can: -quickly view and scrub through photos in a folder -do light editing (histogram adjustments) -can read and edit metadata -optionally, rate photos
It depends on what kind of pictures you want to catalog, what kind of processing you'll need and how many pictures you have to manage, and what kind of information you need to tag. There's also the migration issue.
Softwares like lightroom store data in a database, meaning that if you change your computer, you also have to transfer that database and the same folder structure. Others edit exif data that are inside the picture. Which only works with pictures supporting exif/tagging. Finally, you have software like DxO optics pro that store data in a side file.
You also have websites like flickr that offer picture storage (1TB), or google photos (unlimited with pictures under a certain size), that can sort data from exif data (including geotagging if your camera supports gps).
You have the choice, there are many solutions, BUT the problem is about perennity. I used to work with lightroom, until version 4.5 or so, which happened to be extremely slow. That's when i switched to DxO and Capture One. No tagging or sorting could be transferred.
As for me, i'm just sorting my jpeg pictures in folders on my PC. With folders like Date Event X>Good, Date Event X>Bad. Raw files have processing and tagging data linked to the software. And i store my pictures online on multiple services, mainly flickr. These allow me to tag pictures or to store them in multiple albums, e.g: a picture is stored in the "excellent", "Olympus E420" and "mountains" albums.
DxO pictures is free for version 9. Online storages mentioned are also free. The choice is yours, it heavily depends on your needs.
The usual suspect in the Windows universe is Adobe Lightroom. It does not come free, but it is in its sixth major version and has a lot of kinks ironed out.
It has powerful cataloguing and rating options suitable for professional work (meaning thousands and thousands photos and projects) + some light editing.
I use XnView MP, it's a free and fast viewer. It reads raw, jpeg, tiff and even vector files with a few plugins. You can read here about cataloging features:
http://www.xnview.com/wiki/index.php/Cataloging_Features_in_XnView_MP
