Noodle Gallery- Open-source, self-hosted alternative to Google Photos and Immich

jmathai•41 minutes ago

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.

chrismorgan•about 2 hours ago

Better link: https://opennoodle.de/

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/.

chekibreki•32 minutes ago

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.

y-c-o-m-b•about 2 hours ago

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.

EDIT: hmm after reviewing the repo, I'm going to wait a bit to see how this works out. There's a difference between LLM-assisted software development and blindly vibe-coding things without review and this seems a bit like the latter. I see no contributors and hundreds of commits in a very short amount of time. That's a red flag for now.

Deeds67•26 minutes ago

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.

Cheers! Pierre

bastawhiz•about 2 hours ago

It's not really an alternative to Immich as the title says, it's a fork that's continuously rebased with each release.

Firerouge•about 2 hours ago

And quite a few of the features seem like common sense additions that should be pulled into Immich itself.

It's not entirely clear to me what warranted a forked release, are the immich devs not open to accepting some of these new features?

bo0tzz•about 2 hours ago

They forked because these are all heavily vibecoded changes that we don't want to merge upstream as such. (- I'm on the Immich team)

ubertaco•about 1 hour ago

I read their "why use our fork" page, and it's very obviously AI-written, which causes me to distrust it.

As a happy Immich self-hoster, I'm not excited by the idea of switching to a fork written by folks who can't even be bothered to write their "why this fork exists" explanation themselves. It inspires very low confidence both in the quality of the many additions (because of the vibecoding) and the long-term sustainability of the project (because of the lack of any effort, and because vibe-coded one-offs tend to die faster than labors of love).

Buried at the very bottom of the wall of slop text on their "why our fork" page is this very last "FAQ" question:

>Why fork at all instead of upstreaming features?

>Several Gallery-exclusive features (Shared Spaces, Pet Detection, contextual filters) were either declined upstream, considered out of scope, or required architectural changes that wouldn't have fit Immich's roadmap. Forking lets us experiment without slowing down the upstream team — and rebasing means we never lose touch with their progress.

There's no mention there of "our vibe-coded implementations of these features were declined by upstream because we vibecoded them"; instead, they frame it as "upstream doesn't want these features for their users", with a dash of "upstream has made bad design decisions" (particularly the note about how upstream Immich "required architectural changes").

That's more than a little disingenuous on "Noodle Gallery's" part.

Noodle Gallery- Open-source, self-hosted alternative to Google Photos and Immich

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