digiKam

digiKam is the missing catalog half of the Lightroom replacement story: it manages libraries of hundreds of thousands of photos with hierarchical tags, geolocation, offline face recognition, duplicate detection, and batch processing. The database is local (SQLite or MariaDB), no subscription, no cloud lock-in, and it delegates RAW developing to its built-in editor or external tools.

It’s a big, sometimes overwhelming application — the settings dialog alone can eat an afternoon — and the built-in editor is nowhere near darktable or RawTherapee for developing. Face recognition is decent but needs manual training to get accurate. If your library is small, something lighter like Shotwell may be all you need.