Share a Hierarchical Folder of Albums

I am trying to move away from Dropbox to iCloudy type storage. My wife and I both need access to the pictures stored on Dropbox which exceeds 30k pictures. These pictures are in folders by year by event in Dropbox. I wish to keep the underlying hierarchical listing like iPhoto”root”>Folder By Year>Album by Event and then share all of that with my wife. I may be wrong but it appears that photos can be in more than one iPhoto album so I could still make albums on the fly that crossed the structure above.

Is there any way to do this in iPhoto? We have a mix of Macs and iOS devices. Each of us have our own Apple id’s with family sharing enables. Am I stuck just sharing the photo’s in folders on iCloud when folder sharing becomes a thing in iOS 13 and Catalina? Can I merge the two iPhoto databases and share a single iPhoto database? Can’t work through shared albums because you apparently can’t share folders and can’t nest albums. Besides the limit is 5k pics in shared albums.

Apple is late-ish to understand that people live in family groups that share everything. They’ve made a lot of progress on some fronts but photos is still problematic. We want a single collection of photos with all the iPhoto goodness shared across all of our family devices. Any ideas on how we might make this happen are appreciated.