Posted by xabd 1 day ago
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
https://metadatafixer.com/learn/how-to-download-google-takeo...
I struggled with Immich, I didn't like the rclone option. I'm intending to go back to Immich but my first priority was to get the stuff out of Google. That's done, so with all my free time (ha!) I can get the family Immich going.
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
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).
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!
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/.
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).
It often talks about negatives and things that stuff doesn't do.
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
Their page: https://opennoodle.de
Their GitHub: https://github.com/open-noodle/gallery
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?
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.
So far the Noodle communications feel considered, professional and friendly (that’s what a Claude sub buys you), while the Immich communication is just “vibe coded”.
Okay - is the code bad? Are you collaborating to improve it? The answer appears to be no, for reasons hopefully better considered than “vibe coded”.
[0]: https://immich.app/roadmap [1]: https://immich.app/blog/v3.2.0-release
Is “heavily vibe coded” supposed to signal bad code quality or is it simply how it was created?
Additionally, the author claims to not have vibe coded the features, so some of your credibility is on the line here in claiming they did.
If someone told me to choose between two barbecue restaurants, where one used an wood-fired smoker and the other used a microwave, my reaction wouldn't be "you really shouldn't judge based on just the process." The microwave is a sufficient indicator of low quality.
Vibecoding (as distinct from using AI as a resource while writing better code yourself) is the microwave: fast, hands-off, low-effort, low-quality.
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.
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.