Well, thought to give an update on my digiKam indexing and how long it took to index my 24Terabytes of media.
digiKam is a great tool, and I configured it to use the MariaDB to manage all my metadata and tags for my images. It took about 2 months on and off indexing the drives. Finding out some configuration to disable indexing at times because it took a long time to respond.
In the end, all of the media has been index and ready to process COCO prediction and object detectors models to help create additional tags and built up my metadata.
I think it may be improved if I had consolidated digiKam with the drives in one server and ran the SQLite database. Possible built some kind of API to access the database from SQLite DB at some point, and import the dataset into MariaDB.