alt Hacker News> The out-of-the-box Shotwell manages photos quite well without any intelligence.
This piqued my interest on how it does it and after briefly checking the project it seems it only has two features for automatic photo categorization. 1) it can group photos by date and 2) It has face detection and recognition that uses trained weights (so ML "intelligence").
Immich (server) also has a whole host of ML features for classification as well.
I got away from google images and upload to my own Immich instance.
I also use an open source camera app on fdroid to degoogle that whole path.