I struggled with this for a long time, and then I just decided to use synology photos.

It has albums, tagging, geolocation, sharing. It has phone picture backup, it is inherently a backup as it’s on my NAS and I back that data up again.

I want to keep the thing that I really care about the most friction free and also not too dependent on myself so that I can still experiment.

I didn’t try PiGallery2 though, maybe I will have a look!