Kodi Community Forum

I'm new to Kodi, checking it out if it's a good fit for my intended usecase on a little htpc with photos and videos.  I have a pretty large photo collection managed by Shotwell. I've been searching through plugins (found nothing), and this board.
This forum contains some 5+ year old threads with links to google code, so if any has existed, afaict those are now dead.

Here's what I would like: photo navigation which is not directory-based, but uses the information in the shotwell database and presents
a view of photos in the relevant subcategory. E.g all photos in "2018".

The current directory-structure for my files is "year/month/day", and that's not very nice to navigate through.
So, my question(s):

- As I understand it, I would need to write an add-on of "plugin" type (not script). The plugin could read the shotwell database and just serve content to the "main" program.
  - Could it also serve pregenerated thumbnails from shotwell db?
- Is there anything I should be aware of? Like, is there already some alternative solution (existing plugin or alternative to Kodi) which might fit me better?

There have been vague ideas, but so far Kodi has no picture database of its own.Sure, the photos/images section of Kodi hasn't received all the support. Most attention is given to the video section. So a Shotwell add-on could be solution.

Also, Kodi does have and use its own thumbnail cache system for photos/images, just no database. How to go about an external cache is beyond me (I'm not a Kodi developer).
Perhaps someone else can step in there. Shotwell is of course a Linux-only application, and Kodi being multi-platform, a multi-platform photo application would have bigger benefit.