The submitted title’s framing “alternative to Google Photos and Immich” is dodgy because this is a soft fork of Immich, adding certain features, described in https://opennoodle.de/noodle-gallery-vs-immich/.
Thank you for that -- the workaround for multiple users sharing a set of photos plus their own stuff is the one thing that's kept my family away from adopting it.
I don't know if I'm getting more sensitive to Claudisms because I've been reading them everywhere (and I use Claude a fair bit myself), but I feel like the comparison page is full of them.
> The shortcoming. Immich's face recognition is account-scoped. One real person becomes a separate entry in your library, in your partner's library, and in every shared album you both touch. Search for them and you get a third of their photos. Name them in one account and the name stays there. The People page tracks containers, not people.
This definitely reeks of LLM (I’m not even going to attempt to understand it). I’ve seen similar false contrasts and awkwardly worded sentences before in other LLMs, but GPT would probably say “rather than people” instead. Claude does have a distinct style (that, to be fair, is copied by many others, recently noticed it in GLM 5.3 Flash).
So it is Immich but they pointed Claude at it and let it go wild?
The entire landing page screams AI generated, all the typical front-end tells of Fable and Opus are there (the colours, the flashing status indicator, the fonts, the rounded tiles with the coloured left border, the claudisms, I could go on).
My only issue with Immich is the partner sharing and face recognition overhead per account. It is a massive oversight. Looks like Noodle Gallery explicitly solves this (and more). I'm sold.
Hey, I'm the main contributor to this repo. I do review the code - the reason why all of the commits are shown in a short time is just because of the way that I rebase on upstream Immich.
I have been working on this project for 6 months, and (contrary to what the Immich team posts every single time my project is mentioned) I do not blindly vibe code - or are folks saying that blindly vibe coding 40+ working features while staying in sync with upstream over 6 months is possible?
I really enjoy working on this project and have been building everything that I felt missing in my setup. If you try it out and aren't happy with it, every release ships with a script that reverts your db to Immich, so you're never locked in.
I know this post is about Noodle, but I want to talk about Immich.
I believe I've spent, perhaps, the most time of anyone on earth on digital photo management (hard to quantify, but since 2005 - 2 startups, one acquisition, and an ongoing open source project used by thousands).
I say that because I've refused to settle for most solutions in this space. Even when I adopted using Google Photos, it was as a read only viewer of my canonical photo library (I wasn't about to let Google take that responsibility). I have such high demands of whatever software I use for managing my photos and videos - they're really the only digital files I actually care about.
Immich is absolutely wonderful. It may have some shortcomings ... like partner sharing and sharing facial recognition between users. But man is it remarkable that an open source project can rival something from Google in terms of quality and experience.
And a soft fork like Noodle is precisely the way to handle it. I am perfectly happy with Immich so am not a user of Noodle. But it's open source flexing its strength.
As someone looking to exfiltrate my photos from Google, I'm about to trial Immich, and I really appreciate you sharing your experience. Sounds like it's a good next step for me.
There's plenty of tutorials but you can request a Google Takeout of your photos and then point immich-go at it. I can confirm that this works really well.
>But man is it remarkable that an open source project can rival something from Google in terms of quality and experience.
I'd argue Google is always way worse than the open source alternative in both quality and ux. Their products are terrible. From Gmail to Youtube, the product itself comes second (or Nth), while in open source the product is always first.
In my experience, most open source photo apps lacked basic features like facial recognition, mobile apps, etc. And where they do exist, the UX isn't the best. Are there ones I'm unaware of?
Kano predicted that users' perceptions of satisfaction with a feature will shift from delight to expectation over time. This is either because they have got used to it or because competitors have started to include it in their offerings. In the case of the touchscreen, for instance, the newness that came with the iPhone is no longer a novelty; the touchscreen has become the norm. It's no big deal anymore, but taking it away would be a big deal!
Since we're on Immich, please let me vent out my frustrations after having looked at it recently.
Why the love affair with forcing absolutely everything into strict temporal constraints? Is there a single view in Immich that isn't peppered with date headings?
And I genuinely do not understand what the sharing feature is even for. What are you sharing? It can't be albums because an album would be a series of photos you yourself arranged, independent of when the photos were taken, and this seems a completely foreign concept in Immich land.
My photos and videos are the most important files I have in my self-hosted storage system. Being end-to-end encrypted buys some peace of mind knowing that it's not end of world if my homelab is compromised. And I can backup the data to whatever public clouds without worrying too much about leaking data.
I have great things to say as well. I left Google Photos about 1 year ago or two, used Takeout to export my ~terabyte of Google Photos, imported to Immich on my mac mini, along with more personal archives of photos. I store the images on an external SSD array (https://paulstamatiou.com/gear/owc-express-4m2-nvme-ssd-encl...) that I have backed up with Restic+Backrest to some cloud providers.
My mac mini hosts it behind tailscale to all my devices and it's been working great.
Is it possible to integrate Noodle into iOS, i.e. upload new photos into noodle automatically, browse them on the iPhone and if I delete them on my iPhone sync this deletion to the server? AFAIK iOS discriminates against non-Apple apps and does not let them run background jobs.
Immich has an app that just needs to connect to an Immich server, which this would effectively be. It does the background sync, though I don't think it does the delete part.
The one caveat here is that, because Apple only really allows certain apps the privilege of running in the background without being interrupted or killed, I could never get the iOS version of Immich to reliably sync photos without having to manually open it and leave the app open until sync finished.
This was a few years ago, and was one of several "iOS breaks our crucial workflows" problems that motivated switching our last device over to Android, so the situation might be better now...but I've never had that problem with the Android client, so I know it's not an Immich problem.
You don’t need to run your app in the background. You can register your app as some extension to handle photo backups/cloud storage and you just setup a request to upload to a particular url when a new photo is added, iOS will background those requests and retry them and what not.
Why would you want this? What's the point of the server if you mirror deletes?
I have the opposite problem, well, my partner does. Her phone regularly fills up completely with pictures so I want to copy them to a server and then delete them from the phone, but for some reason this doesn't seem to be supported. My theory is Apple wants you to keep buying newer phones with exorbitantly priced storage upgrades.
>Why would you want this? What's the point of the server if you mirror deletes?
Sharing and backups, with the phone serving as the "source of truth" and the server as a replica that is more accessible to a partner/friend/etc than the contents of your phone's filesystem.
Was there a reason these features were not accepted to upstream Immich and needed to be in a fork?
Looking at the latest commits, Noodle Galery has many signed with Claude, but Immich doesn't. Is LLM policy a reason for fork? (Just speculating, I don't know.)
UPD: Immich has this in CONTRIBUTING.md, seems like its LLM policy is more strict:
> We ask you not to open PRs generated with an LLM.
vs. Noodle Galery:
> We actively encourage the use of LLMs and AI coding tools.
Please no AI slop. I don't want another app that spams my server megabytes per second because my proxy failed and the programmer didn't acknowledge the server can ever go down (talking about Immich - their retry mechanism used to be a while true loop with no back off nor retry limit) or the app resets the upload whenever I bring the app to foreground (also talking about Immich).
Seems to be a fork of Immich. They claim performance is a goal but it's still written in Node.JS? Curious.
I tried to do something very similar a while back (https://github.com/denysvitali/immich-go-backend) but didn't fully follow through. Immich sucks, sadly, performance wise and in terms of storage (they don't support S3, WTF).
I'll eventually get back go it and complete my port.
S3 storage is the killer addition here for me. I have been wanting to use Immich for a while, but wanted to use all the spare s3 quota i have lying around rather than pay for storage..
45 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 17.5 ms ] threadThe submitted title’s framing “alternative to Google Photos and Immich” is dodgy because this is a soft fork of Immich, adding certain features, described in https://opennoodle.de/noodle-gallery-vs-immich/.
It often talks about negatives and things that stuff doesn't do.
This definitely reeks of LLM (I’m not even going to attempt to understand it). I’ve seen similar false contrasts and awkwardly worded sentences before in other LLMs, but GPT would probably say “rather than people” instead. Claude does have a distinct style (that, to be fair, is copied by many others, recently noticed it in GLM 5.3 Flash).
The entire landing page screams AI generated, all the typical front-end tells of Fable and Opus are there (the colours, the flashing status indicator, the fonts, the rounded tiles with the coloured left border, the claudisms, I could go on).
I have been working on this project for 6 months, and (contrary to what the Immich team posts every single time my project is mentioned) I do not blindly vibe code - or are folks saying that blindly vibe coding 40+ working features while staying in sync with upstream over 6 months is possible?
I really enjoy working on this project and have been building everything that I felt missing in my setup. If you try it out and aren't happy with it, every release ships with a script that reverts your db to Immich, so you're never locked in.
Cheers! Pierre
Your response clears up a little about why this fork was necessary, as I had been wondering along with many others.
It might make sense to be clearer about this to get ahead of the skepticism.
I believe I've spent, perhaps, the most time of anyone on earth on digital photo management (hard to quantify, but since 2005 - 2 startups, one acquisition, and an ongoing open source project used by thousands).
I say that because I've refused to settle for most solutions in this space. Even when I adopted using Google Photos, it was as a read only viewer of my canonical photo library (I wasn't about to let Google take that responsibility). I have such high demands of whatever software I use for managing my photos and videos - they're really the only digital files I actually care about.
Immich is absolutely wonderful. It may have some shortcomings ... like partner sharing and sharing facial recognition between users. But man is it remarkable that an open source project can rival something from Google in terms of quality and experience.
And a soft fork like Noodle is precisely the way to handle it. I am perfectly happy with Immich so am not a user of Noodle. But it's open source flexing its strength.
https://takeout.google.com/?pli=1 https://github.com/simulot/immich-go
I'd argue Google is always way worse than the open source alternative in both quality and ux. Their products are terrible. From Gmail to Youtube, the product itself comes second (or Nth), while in open source the product is always first.
I say this as someone whose last startup (circa 2012) was an open source photo app (https://github.com/photo/frontend).
Why the love affair with forcing absolutely everything into strict temporal constraints? Is there a single view in Immich that isn't peppered with date headings?
And I genuinely do not understand what the sharing feature is even for. What are you sharing? It can't be albums because an album would be a series of photos you yourself arranged, independent of when the photos were taken, and this seems a completely foreign concept in Immich land.
My photos and videos are the most important files I have in my self-hosted storage system. Being end-to-end encrypted buys some peace of mind knowing that it's not end of world if my homelab is compromised. And I can backup the data to whatever public clouds without worrying too much about leaking data.
Gonna add it to the moose store for self hosters
My mac mini hosts it behind tailscale to all my devices and it's been working great.
https://medium.com/swlh/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-go...
I removed it from my workflow when its integration with Drive was sunset.
I was without a great UI for a couple years, paying attention to Immich in my periphery. I decided to add Immich this year on a Mac Mini as well.
https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...
This was a few years ago, and was one of several "iOS breaks our crucial workflows" problems that motivated switching our last device over to Android, so the situation might be better now...but I've never had that problem with the Android client, so I know it's not an Immich problem.
I have the opposite problem, well, my partner does. Her phone regularly fills up completely with pictures so I want to copy them to a server and then delete them from the phone, but for some reason this doesn't seem to be supported. My theory is Apple wants you to keep buying newer phones with exorbitantly priced storage upgrades.
Sharing and backups, with the phone serving as the "source of truth" and the server as a replica that is more accessible to a partner/friend/etc than the contents of your phone's filesystem.
Looking at the latest commits, Noodle Galery has many signed with Claude, but Immich doesn't. Is LLM policy a reason for fork? (Just speculating, I don't know.)
UPD: Immich has this in CONTRIBUTING.md, seems like its LLM policy is more strict:
> We ask you not to open PRs generated with an LLM.
vs. Noodle Galery:
> We actively encourage the use of LLMs and AI coding tools.
Their page: https://opennoodle.de
Their GitHub: https://github.com/open-noodle/gallery
Does anything suggest that it is?
> I don't want another app that spams my server megabytes per second ...
Clearly this is independent of the use of AI, as elaborated by yourself.
Read the website.
Seems to be a fork of Immich. They claim performance is a goal but it's still written in Node.JS? Curious.
I tried to do something very similar a while back (https://github.com/denysvitali/immich-go-backend) but didn't fully follow through. Immich sucks, sadly, performance wise and in terms of storage (they don't support S3, WTF).
I'll eventually get back go it and complete my port.
For more context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46171726