Selfhosted

They do; just not optimized for that task

I hear you, I went through the same journey. After getting Immich set up, I haven’t had to do a single thing to it. There are scripts that can turn your folders into Immich albums, so I just set up the docker containers, ran the script, and watched as everything was created for me without more labor on my part.

I hope somebody else has the solution you’re looking for, but if you don’t find it, I really think you should give it a whirl because it turned out to be way easier than I expected it to be.

Immich isn't complex, and I don't think it requires a separate database.

Edit: just checked and technically it does, but if you use the docker compose then it deploys it automatically and you don't have to think about it at all.

Edit2: if you really want something dead simple, yeah you could trivially write a tiny script to list and thumbnail images. I'm sure there are apache plugins for exactly this.

It does nothing but serve photo. Background tasks are minimal and many of them only run once on new photos.

You're likely not going to find something so simple and lightweight. Immich has some setup, but if you want a good gallery that's the way to go. Don't be afraid of the learning.

I feel like this is a case of not wanting to do the "difficult" thing because it sounds difficult when really avoiding the "difficult" thing is more difficult than just doing the "difficult" thing.

I was replacing the power steering rack on my P2 Volvo XC70 recently. I really didn't want to drop the subframe because that sounded like a lot of work. Eventually I realized dropping the subframe was the easier way to get the power steering rack out and, in the end, it was way easier to just drop the subframe. It was like 10 more bolts and wasn't that hard to put back. In this analogy, Immich is dropping the subframe, just do it.

I've never used Immich so I can't speak for or against it. When I started down the selfhosting road, I found Ente first, that's all.

I run Debian on my VPSes. But, also, I've been through the path of doing what the PKGBUILD does, which is read the Dockerfike and manually execute the steps: I think it's pretty problematic to have to do that every update cycle. Got Immich set up, looked at what I'd have to do every time I want to run an update, and "nope"d out.

With server side software like this, which will usually be running behind a reverse proxy and will connect to a postgres dB (or other services like Redis), I kind of don't want to fight the software/make guesses to create these connections. I also take umbrage with the nginx proxying "example" configurations - just tell me what needs to be proxied to where and let me handle the rest; it's a server, you don't know my setup. Case in point, I don't use nginx.

I like photofield because it's a single binary (thanks, Go) listening on a port. I proxy what I need to it, and let it run.

Final note: I'm not knocking Immich, or the people who run it. I just think it's lazy to distribute software with Docker because it encourages devs to write what I consider to be poorly designed software (E.g. Software with hard coded paths as strings, because everything is expected to be in the same place on every system - basically very rigid defaults). As a guy who knows his systems well, it annoys me I can't manage them my way and need to run a nebulous docker container set up by some web developer. (some shade thrown there, my bad)

You don't have to agree with me, I'm Don Quixote and this is one of my windmills.