Time to dust off my side project, Timeliner [1] which downloads your Google Photos (and other content from various services) and indexes them in a local SQLite DB.
Then after backing them up locally, I won't feel bad about deleting them from the cloud later to free up space.
I've been using Timeliner for a while but need to update it. New maintainers welcomed, if you're interested!
(One major "oof" is that the Google Photos API strips geolocation data, so unfortunately coordinates are lost when using this method. There's discussion about using Takeout as a workaround, or even automating web browser interactions, but those have their own problems too.)
Another alternative is Perkeep (formerly known as Camlistore) https://perkeep.org/ and there's even a tool to extract your pics from Google Photos https://github.com/perkeep/gphotos-cdp and move them to Perkeep.