Indeed, I'm learning towards downloading the 134GB and doing it all myself. I'm learning towards digikam for organization (tagging, cropping, organizing, etc) and then using one of the upload methods to something like piwigo (self hosted or a service). That way I have control, can have it backed up, and won't have to endure the random changes google has been making.

The weirdest of which is that pixel 4 prices are higher than expected (even higher than Apple!) and they are dropping the free backup full quality photo backups.