Hopefully. The best I've found for my purposes so far, is windows live, except that it keeps the database in "applications data" and when I looked it was up around 4gb which I thought was a bit naughty to have on the system drive. So currently its disabled until I stick a TB drive in there.

if you save jpg max quality loss is quite invisible ... depend on what you need photos for.

It's a good idea to delete exif info in case you're publishing photos on Flickr/social nets/etc. You may want to hide GPS coordinates taken from a built-in receiver, or date&time, or equipment-related information. And I personally use this batch exif remover for that purpose. The good that it lets me to selectively deal not only with exif, but also with Adobe XMP, IPTC, and other photographic metadata.

Besides GPS info, I can't think of any reason to withhold EXIF info... IMO. Unless you consider your work to be of such worth that someone might "steal" your "technique". Other than that, it's all a bit tin-foil-hat as far as I'm concerned.