I repurposed one of his old laptops (that overheats, sadly) as frontend, making room for an Ubuntu partition.
I installed the trusty #recoll to index text documents and emails.
For images, I ended up using #KPhotoAlbum, that has very flexible tagging possibilities, making it useful on more than photo albums. Chronological view and image stacking are also great.
I used #Geeqie, then more recently #Czkawka for finding image #duplicates, that I then stacked manually in KPhotoAlbum.

https://linuxnews.de/2020/08/kphotoalbum-5-7-0-erschienen/
#KPhotoAlbum #release #fotosammlung #KDE #KDEapp