I'm leaning towards Immich at the moment if I can't configure pixelfed to my liking.
On the chat side of things that is sort of what we do now but I was wanting something a bit more asynchronous. With chat we can send photos, but what we were wanting is somewhere to just post stuff and other family can view it on their own time or go back and see a previous post. With chat it's a bit too ephemeral for the grandmas and grandpas...they keep asking us to send the same photos because they cant find it in the chat history :/