Wrote the following to my tech:
Well, we survived Mom's 90th birthday party. I was till 9:00 p.m. Friday night just doing the framed displays. My cousin who helped me carry them to the hotel Saturday did an entire music album which was an homage to Pink Floyd's The Wall, so I sang to him (to the tune of "Another Brick in the Wall,") "We don't need no stinkin' slide show/We got lots of prints to see." I also told a group of relatives on Friday night that anyone who mentions the state of the house and yard risks physical assault, and anyone who says, "Great prints, where's the slide show?" will be fiercely bitten about the head and ears. In truth, many more people will see the slide show images in a Facebook album (I still want to do a high resolution version of everything for relatives--another story) than would have seen a slide show at the party (considering that many more of Mom's friends and family were unable to attend than were able) and everyone can look at each picture as long as they want. Her actual birthday is not for three more days so I am willing to be tortured that much longer and then post something the night before or on the actual birthday.
Pictures taken before 2007 were all printed (though I never did find most of mine from 2007 in any form--I'm getting worried and have to check into that)--and everything for the slide show for as far as I got either for scanning or framing, were scanned straight from the prints! I did not attempt negatives as scanning just three slides with my equipment drove me into near fits. A cousin brought some other type of slide scanner (which I didn't even have time to look at) along with thousands of her father's slides (a few of which I saw) and we will get together about exchanging scans.
So here are my thoughts. Please tell me if they make sense. I said I was fed up, had it, through, with the Photos App. Thing is you did that neat thing with connecting everything on the Cloud so that it all shows up on my cell phone. This is mostly good as when I want to show pictures, I have a choice of all pictures, not just those shot on the phone, and it saves using up memory on the phone. I would like to keep this, so I am thinking when we get a complete, clean copy of whatever is digitized--which I hope, if those four years' worth of pictures are not lost, will be everything--that we should, using the app you recommended earlier (and you told or can tell me how to install that) redo or correct the Photos Library so that it has one copy of everything and no duplicates, and I will keep that copy!
I still want to do the Adobe Lightbox, but as I understand that's only a Photo Library with editing tools, it doesn't come with full resolution Cloud backup, or does it? Because if it does perhaps I need only the sorting app you recommended which works so well with Macs, and the Adobe Lightbox, if not I need at least either Amazon Photos, Google Photos, Backblaze, or all of the above, as I don't trust Photos to a) PUT my cherished pictures on the Cloud, b) KEEP them there, and c) Store anything so I can ever find it again!
As for the G4 hard drive situation. The G4 had more than one hard drive and obviously if there was a right one the one I pulled was the wrong one. So pictures taken 2010-2014 never even got looked at along with a lot of others. I got so harassed and flustered I threw the hard drive into a drawer still connected to the transferring equipment and there it sits. Later today I hope to become brave enough to replace it, remove the other, and see if it may contain the missing information. Then we can proceed with completing and streamlining a full library. Thanks so much for your wonderful knowledge!