I use Google Photos on my iPhone just that I can do searches like this on my library. (And that I can auto-share photos with my family, half of them are on Androids.)
This is on some queries much better than that. Which is amazing, given that it runs locally.
It still doesn’t have the face recognition and the geographical information that Google Photos have.
Including a dump of just lat/lon/rad->city from openstreetmap probably kilobytes. Including towns and features might be low megabytes.
But your workflow is such a hassle that I doubt many people would do it. A more realistic flow (without the list of places above) would be to show an image of the world map, allow the user to zoom in, and let them drop a pin on the map. They can drop a pin near some pixels labeled Paris, but the app doesn't need to know that it's Paris, it just needs to translate the pixel coordinates of the pin (relative to the image) to geographical coordinates, and look for images close to these coordinates.
Then on selecting a location you present a button that then jumps you back into the app via a universal link (passing in lon/lat)
But up to you