I commend your bravery in wishing to do this, it could be a huge undertaking depending on several factors. I’d suggest research thoroughly, backup, and have a couple of plans, take lots of notes. Clarifying your goals will help too, as there are so many options.
Maybe try new software on a limited batch of copied image files before commiting to one.
Take some time to look big picture, like what you do with your photos, how much time you have to put in to it and so on.
I started shooting film as a child around 1968, shot for school papers and yearbooks and professionally at newspapers a couple of years. Moved into digital early ‘00s as a hobby. I’ve been through several apps over the decades as my use of photography has evolved. I liked Aperture a lot despite some drawbacks and when it was abandoned by Apple I developed my current, ah, ‘system’ 
.
Someday I want to digitize my physical collections but as I’ve seen what happens with software development/business plans over the decades I am trying to get as platform-independent as possible. Plus, my archiving and sharing needs are minimal.
What I’ve done is switch to a Finder-based organization and naming scheme, then use apps that can work the photos without copying/importing them. This way the photos are not hogging space or locked into any software other than basic computing, and I can relatively easily switch organizing software.
I import photos into this file structure on the Mac from iPhone with a USB cable and digital cameras’ storage cards via card adapters, til now with Image Capture, into ‘staging’ folders and when I have time I look at them and rename and delete and organize them further. Inspired by a TBT Topic, I’m more and more using GraphicConverter 12 to rename and maybe also import, as it has some nicely time-saving renaming features.
Lately I’m not manipulating the photos much, often in Photos first on iPhone, send them off as needed but mostly I snap for recordkeeping/documentation so organizing is more important than manipulation tools.
I don’t use anything Adobe or “AI”. Been using Nitro to view and manipulate, will look more at GraphicConverter for same, and I also got Acorn at some point but have barely scratched its surface.
Embarking on a home computing evolution which will hopefully result in these photo folders being available locally only on home network and manipulable from Apple and Linux devices. My first attempt I didn’t follow my own advice and it went scarily and time consumingly astray. Luckily I had backups and sufficient internet and TBT support to recover.
I see an advantage in keeping originals in one place and referencing them with other apps.
Hope something in all that is helpful.
) and forget that you are not managing a massive multi-national image database.