How can two users have the same pictures in the Photos app?

To add some context: I am new to the world of NAS. I have looked into the topic before, but this is my first hardware.

So I am still kind of setting up my NAS and getting used to it. One major use case for me and my wife is to easily have access to all of our photos. Ideally, we have mostly shared ones and then also the option for private ones.

Now I know we could set up personal folders for the private pictures and other files, and then a shared folder for the family pictures. But the Photos app seems to only have access to the personal folders. Which would mean we would have to duplicate all pictures. Am I understanding this correctly or is there a way around this? Because we obviously don't want all of the pictures duplicated...

I understand if that is still a software limitation, and that the OS will be improving. Are there maybe other good alternatives that we can use? If I understand it correctly, we could either install an alternative photo app via docker for example, or even a completely different OS. Are there any good recommendations?