Photos disappeared from Macbook Air 2002, M1

It may be that you are seeing a different Photos Library than you expect. Unlike on an iDevice, Macs can have more than one Photos Library. The default Library is named "Photos Library.photoslibrary,," and all Libraries have an extension of ".photoslibrary." These Photos Libraries are usually in the Pictures folder, but they can be other places.

You can see what Libraries are on your Mac by closing Photos and then option-clicking on the Photos icon. You get the Library Chooser:

that shows each Library that Photos knows about, and the path to them. The one designated as the System Library is the only one that can synchronize with iCloud. You can use this dialog to open other Libraries. Or you can find a Library and double click on it to open it in Photos. You can change which Library is the System Library but, as you can imagine, this will cause some confusion to iCloud's Photos Library-- and maybe more confusion for you.

A Photos Library can't work if it's been moved to the Mac's iCloud Drive. It can't work from a networked drive. And it can't work from an improperly formatted external drive.

Let us know what you find…

Terry Neal wrote: … When I click on the PHOTOS icon on my MAC, there is no option for "CHOOSE LIBARY."

Did you close Photos first, and then option-click on the Photos icon? Quoting,

You can see what Libraries are on your Mac by closing Photos and then option-clicking on the Photos icon. You get the Library Chooser

It doesn't sound like that's what you did. This is important, since the Chooser shows the paths to the Libraries.

iCloud appears to have my entire photo library, 70.2 gb.

Appears how?

But it will not opened and there is an IGNORED written below the folder.

Ignored may mean that your Library is in the iCloud Drive folder where it cannot work.

On my Mac, in my user folder (my name) I have:

Photos Library photoslibrary 0 mb (not in a folder, just my user name folder

Finder is an app that shows your files. For instance, my user folder, rtaylor, is inside the Users folder inside the Mac folder, so Finder shows this:

So, when I say "in Finder," I mean shown by the Finder app. All that applies to Explorer in Windows, too.

IN my PICTURES folder, there is:

iCloud photos, and below that Photo Library photoslibrary 1.2 mb. no path

There should be no file or folder called iCloud Photos. I don't know what you mean by "below," but it would be way more useful if you would include a screenshot. I would like to see screenshots of your Pictures folder and of your iCloud Drive folder and anything else that looks odd.

Take a screenshot on Mac

A picture, like a screenshot, can be loaded here by copying and pasting, or by using the icon

below here to grab a file. Once it's here, you can grab the little handles at the corners of the picture to resize it.

Another thing to give us information his to look at Photos' Settings>General to see the path to the current (empty, I think you said) Library:

Here you see the circled path and "Use as System Library" grayed out, since this is already my System Library.