I really want to get away from Adobe's outrageous subscription costs. I am not a professional photographer but I take a lot of photos. Worse, I take a lot of nature action photos, which means that about 90% of my photos show either a blank blue sky or a blank blue ocean. I've also been taking pictures for a long time, so I have tens of thousands of photos from years past that, let's be honest, I'll never cull manually.
My existing Adobe workflow was pretty seamless: I had a Mobile catalog in Lightroom to "show people Favorites," and "ingest photos from everywhere," and an Archive catalog in Lightroom Classic. Once a photo synched to Archive I removed it from Mobile so that it wouldn't consume my Adobe Cloud allotment. The only challenge would come to the extent my "show people" albums became huge, but that is unrealistic. I could triage in Mobile and crop and manipulate the better ones for immediate posting. Those decisions would all transfer, when I was back at my desktop, over to Archive. I would occasionally screw up with iPhone photos and end up duplicating a batch, but that was an occasional problem.
The thing I expected to be most difficult was the archive: tens of thousands of photos from god knows how many cameras and many incorrect file dates and metadata ranking and keywording for probably 10% of the better ones. To support the travel-desktop ingestion and triage issue I tried to develop a workflow of [device]->Apple Photos->Digikam. This actually worked okay for the workflow aspect but crashes into the second-level problem, which is manipulation.
My manipulation is very unrefined: I crop almost every image and I'll often come up with color-correction settings that work for a bunch of photos from the same shoot (again: lots of stacked action photos). Beyond that, I pretty much only add some sharpening for screen output and only really do fine-tuning for the rare images that I'm going to print and hang on a wall. That's the only use-case where maybe Photoshop delivers me something Lightroom doesn't. Digikam is poor for this, it's photo manipulation abilities feel like a bunch of unrelated plugins. The only thing that Digikam that Lightroom doesn't is allow you to crop by dragging from a corner, where Lightroom, bizarrely, only gives you the option of dragging from the center. I find this bizarre because you never want the subject smack dab in the middle of the image and its always the edges where you're concentrating on not crowding or cropping things in the middle or whatever. C'est la vie. Also, Digikam can hang or take forever when running long-running functions like face recognition or ingestion. I'm not talking about face recognition over the whole catalog, but more like "over the course of my vacation."
Back to culling. Excire promises blisteringly fast culling, enhanced by the power of AI (ooh-aah!!!!). Their AI stinks. I'm sure they are running their own far-from-flagship 18-months-behind model. Useless. I know that I'm spoiled in that I have an almost-certainly-better local model and can write a script to query one of the flagship models in a way that's potentially affordable, but, again, c'es la vie.
So the whole thing with Excire, to me, is "how fast can I cull with the keyboard?" And here is the worst thing and I'll feature this in the tl;dr: because it's really all that needs to be said: Excire is synchronous after you apply a flag or rating. If you have the temerity to jump to the next photo and put a flag on it in less than a second, not only doesn't it work, you get a modal dialog box telling you to wait. This is just pure amateur coding. There is absolutely no reason to block execution while you add a piece of metadata.
I've tried Darktable and it felt even more piecemeal than Digikam and apparently RawTherapee has no cataloging.
All of which is to say that I feel like I've written this entirely to cry about the fact that I'm concluding that I need to go back to paying Adobe $144 / year.
tl;dr: Excire is worthless, Digikam is frustrating and underwhelms on manipulation. I don't think there's a FOSS solution that is less trouble than paying Adobe their ransom.