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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.
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...
https://takeout.google.com/?pli=1 https://github.com/simulot/immich-go
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.
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).
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
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/.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Would you say the code is acceptable for upstreaming into Immich but you just wanted to move faster? Your claim about there suggests the situation to be a little emotionally charged from their side, so I appreciate you highlighting the “friendly fork” and compatibility aspects.
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
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