Moving or storing albums and photos from Elements 14

...but I don't think its a good long term storage option. What do I do?

Good question.

If you mean for the long term (for your children, grand kids...) any organization, whether based on a catalog (organizer or Lightroom...) or on a specific folder tree organization may disappear as time goes by. There are even doubts about the physical support for those digital images: CD, DVD, current hard drive technology. Digital images will most probably have to be copied and converted several times to the future physical support media.

For the very long term, my best suggestion, since you are using albums, is to have photo books printed .

For the next years, what is safe is to store the information you have added to your images (tags, captions, notes, ratings) within the photo files themselves, together with the exif data from your camera. So long as you are using jpeg, tiff, psd or other common formats, your digital files will be readable in the futre by any editing software.

So, start by using the menu File >> Save metadata to file

I have several completed albums that I would like to move (with their associated photos in Media) out of Elements to save space (since I have several years worth of photos and the program is running slowly). How can I move some of these albums and photos to a hard drive, CD or cloud storage?

The organizer is based on a catalog, it does not contain photo file, only links to their location; their location can be on different drives, on CD/DVDs. You can sync your library with Cloud based solutions like Dropbox, Onedrive etc for safety. Your catalog will point to the real location of your files; for Dropbox solutions, it will point with the folder on your drive (the Dropbox app will deal with synching to the Cloud). The same catalog will hold the information for all those locattions.

Now, about saving space: the organizer lets you move selectively parts of your image folder tree from one location (drive) to another by drag and drop from the folder panel on the left. It's common to store all or part of your library to external USB drive for instance.

The program is running slowly? That is not related to the size of your library (except backups, obviously). Don't split your catalogs for that purpose; as suggested above, use different drives. Splitting catalogs is not easy and makes searching through different catalogs with multicriteria very problematic.

A reminder about how to move a library and its catalog to another computer:

Move Elements Organizer catalog | Elements 6 or later

About Cloud solutions:

Advantages:

- relatively secure for the short and middle term

- access from everywhere

- excellent sharing solutions

Drawbacks:

- cost

- even with high speed connections, restoring a big library may require days...

My own choice is to be very selective for cloud based storing.

- no big files (raws, multilayered psd...)

- only keepers (star rating)

- organized by folders reflecting my album structure.

- mainly files I may need to view anywhere anytime, I delete albums which are no longer needed.