[preek]

I did exactly that a couple of months ago. After exporting my pictures, I ran fdupes to find duplicates and then imported all images into Shotwell.

I can still take pics on the phone which will be synced via Dropbox and Shotwell picks them up immediately. The sync is faster than I’m used to on iCloud and finally I just have files that I can tag, again.

Shotwell is also super fast, has a similar UI to photos.app (automatic events for example), but it also had hierarchical tags which it can even write to the files itself. So it’s very simple and yet portable without lock-in. Couldn’t be happier. Of course ymmv.

Good luck!