looking for a laptop for writing and photo editing

We are looking for a lap top to use off line at home.

I would like to be able to edit photos, both ones I've taken and old family ones that I've scanned onto flash drives.
I have a notion I'd like to put a little book together following the women on my mom's side back several generations interspersing scanned letters with photos and also text.and maybe try to put together an ebook about my pet spider

My husband has a writers program on his  dieing laptop that he liked but is open to others.
He used it for layout and arranging into a form our local printer could use for his chap books.
He has other small books in mind so mostly typing and scanning in images.

So, something under $1000...with lots of storage and several usb ports...a program for organizing info into book format, a good photo editing program....

and the big one, most important maybe...a long life.

To continue...We don't have wifi at home only a limited amount of data on this cell phone so what we need is something we can take to the library or friends who have wifi to load programs.

I had a free gimp editing/design program I liked on my old HP pc but the computer was so slow and made editing a chore rather than fun.

Does any one do a lot of writing and photo editing on a laptop?
Any ideas where to start looking?

Hi Judith,
There's a lot to say for personal preference, but I have been impressed with my 8 y.o. MacBook Air, which runs almost as well as it did when new. My wife recently got a newer Mac laptop, and the quality seems to be consistent (though not as many years of data on the new one). Between my wife and myself, personal and work use, over the years, we've owned Sony, IBM, lots of Dell, and Mac, and the Mac is the only one that's really worth writing home about. It might be a little outside the budget, though, if you look new. I have had bad experiences with refurbished Dell & IBM, but would be keen to hear if there's a different take on Mac refurbs.
I use TexWorks/LaTeX for writing, sometimes use Gimp, and in general Mac's native program suite is fine (and no extra cost...ahem...Office...looking at you). The user interface on Macs used to be notably different from Windows, but even that is converging as Windows keeps aping Mac more in each release.
Good hunting!
Mark

Thank you Mark!

I'll check that one out.

Hi Judith,
I'm not sure I would be much help on the software side, but I would highly recommend looking at the business class of laptop from each of the manufacturers. Most have a consumer line and a business line. The business line is not as flashy but goes through a much higher standard of testing and manufacturing resulting in a laptop that is physically stronger than the consumer line. This generally results in longer life. Some of them are in your price range.

HP Pavilion - consumer
HP Probook or Elitebook - business

Dell Inspiron - consumer
Dell Latitude - business

Lenovo T series - business
Lenovo most of the rest - consumer

***Edit - Mac's are good for photo editing, but I suspect most if not all are going to be outside your price range.

Soon microsoft will only support windows 11, therefore many companies will dump their old infrastructure, or sell out very cheap. If you find an reasonably recent (one 2-3 years), and ask someone to install linux on it, yoiu will be set up waaayy cheaper than 1000$, with equal, if not superior quality. That is if you think in the long term.