Making sense of Photos - keep only recent photos on icloud

First of all, I know that photos is not meant to be used like that, but the program has its own merits and it works great if you use multiple devices.

Coming from a photography background I am very prone to fill my quota of iCloud. The issue lies here, that I do not have use or reasons to spend for 200GB or 1TB of cloud storage. To be honest even upgrading iCloud won't resolves all the issue.

For my personal images I am quite happy to use Photos to manage the library, the issue arises when storage starts to become a problem. 50GB is more than enough for current images and I do not need more. Upgrading to 200GB would work for a while, but I do not want to keep originals solely on the cloud to save space on my mac.

I have figured out that Photos could work well with referenced folders wither on an external drive or NAS. Which is what I would like to achieve. Unfortunately I have realised this a bit late and have already some library management that I would like to keep. Hence exporting originals and re-importing them would be a solution for the future.

So I wonder if there is a way to mark images not to be stored in the iCloud so I can then move them and relink, as long as they are on the cloud that is not possible as Photos wants to re-download the originals. Or if someone has any workaround so I can keep edits and albums sorting of photos while moving the originals.

If a person could at least select keep only images from that date on the cloud life would be so much easier.

Any suggestions, even thinking outside of the box, something I haven't mentioned. Maybe I am going about this the wrong way. Anything is appreciated.