This is hard to explain, so I think I'll just suggest to you what I would do:
1) Go to Window | Layout and choose Default Layout as a good starting point.
2) Grab the bottom-right Tasks window by its title bar and drag it towards the bottom-left Preview window. When you hover over this Preview window (with the left mouse button still pressed down), a sign wil appear that shows four arrows around a tabbed little window. Position your cursor over that tabbed window in the center of the sign and let go of the left mouse button. The Tasks panel will now join the Preview panel, and little tabs at the bottom let you switch between these views/functions. I'd click on the Preview tab to activate that view.
3) Close the big Metadata panel on the right by clicking its little 'x' button.
4) Back to the left side of the screen, hover the cursor over the divider between the Location panel and the Preview/Tasks panel, until the cursor changes shape and shows tiny up and down arrows. You can now drag the divider down so you get a larger location window and a smaller Preview/Tasks window. Put it wherever you prefer to have it.
5) Likewise, grab the vertical divider between the Location panel and the big thumbnails pane, and make the location panel smaller (leaving more space for thumbnails).
You should now have an efficient layout that shows you all the most used information, and where eveything stays at its place as long as you don't press any pins and don't drag any panels around (if you ever find yourself mistakenly dragging a panel away, you can press Esc to cancel that action).
I hope this helps! If the resulting layout is not how you wanted things to look, you can use Window | Show Panels to select the panels that you want to see, and use the methods from steps 2 and 4/5 to arrange them.