"Desktop publishing" is the category of software you want. I've not used it, but I believe Scribus is the standard FOSS tool for this. If you want a simple graphical way to make your album, this is the way.

Many people have metnioned LaTex - I would not recommend it for this purpose. LaTex, while powerful, will have a steep learning curve, and isn't really made for artistic tasks - its purpose is for writing technical papers. From literally the first two sentences on the project site:

LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents.

It's probably possible to make a beautiful photo album with LaTex, but without a lot of work, it's more likely to come out looking like a calculator manual.

Are you familiar with LaTeX? You can use plugins that generate PDFs that follow the PDF/X1-a standard and send the resulting PDFs to professional printers.

TeXStudio is a FOSS LaTeX editor that looks well-suited for your use-case.

Since LaTeX documents are just text and your images are already sorted and so on, you could even write a script to construct the first draft of your doc with the pictures arranged consistently, based off the files in your file system, then edit it to tweak it to perfection. You could also/alternatively create or use some reusable LaTeX patterns.

I've heard of publishing software to design photo albums/scrapbooks/cards etc. Is there a photo collection manager for archiving, sorting and filtering?

Given access to a large set of personal photos, say tens of thousands, it should be able to group, categorize, tag, and sort along a myriad of dimensions.

Example dimensions would be time, people and places. It would need some facial recognition/image classifier/similarity scoring capability.

There definitely are some cloud offerings today that do similar things, but I'd want it to work locally for privacy and practical reasons.

I guess you would use something like a desktop publishing software like Scribus, LaTeX, Inkscape or well Libre Office Draw.