Massive Photo Archiving Project - Is Immich the best??

My parents 50th Anniversary is coming up, and like an idiot I've decided that I probably have best skillset in the family to take on archiving seven decades worth of shoeboxes of photos. My current plan is to pick up an Epson FastFoto ff-680w to bulk scan these photos to a network share. From there I believe I can set up an external library in Immich to give it access to the photos in the share. While this is nice because I already have Immich installed, does Immich treat photos in an external folder the same as everything else? Is Immich the best solution for this? It seems like more and more people are using AI for photo restoration, facial recognition, and creating descriptions of the photo for easier text based searching. Is there a selfhosted server out there that provides some of those features for use with local AI? I'd appreciate any advice on this.