Using Ligthroom without cloud storage

Hi all,

I searched for an answer to this question, but what I found is from a while ago, and it seems that the only answer to my dillema is to use LR Classic, so I don't have to deal with storing pictures or anything else in teh cloud. However, it seems to me this software no longer exists. I'll explain my issue briefly, and hopefully someone can point me in the right direction.

I've been using LR4 ever since it was current. I currently have about 8TB (eight terabytes) worth of pictures (about 3.5 million) catalogued, but it's getting a bit slow. My picture collection has been increasing by about a quarter million / ~1TB per year, and will probably not slow down for the next couple of decades.

I'm thinking about upgrading to the Cloud version of LR (or whatever it's called these days) in the hopes that it will be faster. However, uploading my pictures to Adobe cloud storage is obviously impractical: I'd need to wait the better part of three months for all my pictures to upload, I'd need to pay my ISP to allow me to uplopad so much (I checked), soon enough even the max 10TB storage that Adobe offers will not be enough for me, and the cost for that is probably as astronomical as what I was quoted by my ISP for the transfer.

My question, therefore, is simple: is it possible to use whatever version of LR is the most current without storing pictures in the cloud? I don't care if the catalog itself needs to be in the cloud (in fact that's better for me, tbh) but the pictures themselves in the cloud are a waste of time & money.

If LR won't do this for me, is the Organizer in Photoshop Elements similar to LR? Is there anything else I can use? As long as I can move my LR catalog there, I don't care. (I rarely edit pictures, and mostly only use LR to tag them for content.)

Thanks!