Photos have become UNEX Executable files and will not open?

When you add the .jpg extension, the . (period/ full stop is very important) does the icon of the file change from the exec icon to the default jpg icon or something similar, please show some screenshots. If the icon has changed to the jpg icon, highlight the icon, press Command- i to get the info panel up, click on the Open With dropdown and select the default app to open files of this type, Preview is built in to macOS so you could try that. Now see if your image will open.

That is UNIX, and if you have items with an unknown extension, no extension, or the original application set to open them, is removed, or no longer compatible with the current operating system, then the Finder will give up and assign an ExecutableBinary icon to those items.

A good example of this is that I have a bunch of AppleWorks documents on my High Sierra machine. Clearly, AppleWorks is not installed, and all of these .cwk documents sport that preceding icon. I can still open these files in another application (.e.g LibreOffice) that is designed to open them, but their icons remain as before.

Have you tried adding the .jpg extension to one of the files to see if it will now view as an image.

I hope there is some way to transfer my data on this machine with out ever seeing iCloud again. Is there a way of eliminating iCloud from the computer.

Sure. Load Microsoft Windows or Linux or BSD.

Otherwise, no; iCloud is part of macOS.

It’s possible to avoid the use of iCloud, though not to remove it.

What tool or package did you use to view the photos with in the past?

Some add-on photo-viewing package?

Or with the iPhoto.app on older releases or the Photos.app that's now part of macOS.

And are you really running 10.6?

Are there any add-on anti-virus, anti-malware, performance optimizers, cache-cleaners, network monitors and tracking tools, ad-blockers or other such packages around?

I suspect there was an old version of Adobe Photoshop installed here, or some Photoshop-related tooling.

Install or re-install Adobe Photoshop 3.0 or some newer Adobe Photoshop version that can read these existing Photoshop 3.0 PSD files, or convert the Photoshop PSD files into another format.

The Adobe tools can perform various image format conversions, as can tools such as ImageMagick.

If you decide to use ImageMagick, there is some documentation on conversion-specific settings, and there are forums specific to the ImageMagick tool, and some conversion-related discussions.

There are also various discussions of dealing with old versions of Photoshop over at the Adobe forums.

Changing the file extension to an unrelated file type is seldom beneficial, and may well end up confusing the tooling.

ps: I just noticed some converters are available as Safari extensions; another place to look for options.