It depends what you want and what you're willing to compromise on I think. I ended up building my own, which has the advantages it's designed specifically for

It depends what you want and what you're willing to compromise on I think. I ended up building my own, which has the advantages it's designed specifically for my needs (but which obviously means it's less likely to be useful for other people with different requirements or workflows). My two main criteria were: supporting galleries of non-square images (very few solutions support this, they just crop to squares which makes things much easier for layout, but I don't like), and having portable catalogs with the metadata (mine are basically YAML defined metadata per photo, like geo location hierarchies (Europe / France / Paris), tags, categories, such that I am not locked to a DB, and can move the catalogs (and images) around on arbitrary drives / volumes, and can transfer them. The large downside (although I'm willing to put up with it), is having to fairly manually curate each photo item, but a lot of "tourist photo" style stuff is quite similar for me, so I can share multiple metadata for multiple photos, so it's not too bad.