Noodle Gallery- Open-source, self-hosted alternative to Google Photos and Immich (digitalescapetools.com)
54 points by xabd 8 hours ago
jmathai 5 hours 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.
passive 4 hours ago
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.
jmathai 2 hours ago
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.
https://takeout.google.com/?pli=1 https://github.com/simulot/immich-go
kwanbix 2 hours ago
anfogoat an hour ago
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.
e12e an hour ago
Did you also look at https://ente.com/ ?
zzyzxd an hour ago
I was going to recommend ente as well.
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.
papyrus9244 4 hours ago
>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.
jmathai 2 hours ago
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?
I say this as someone whose last startup (circa 2012) was an open source photo app (https://github.com/photo/frontend).
spiffytech an hour ago
chrismorgan 6 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/.
ValentineC 3 hours ago
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.
yonatan8070 2 hours ago
Is "Claudism" Claude-specific signs that other models don't produce? Or would you describe any LLM signs as "Claudisms"?
tclancy 3 hours ago
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.
denysvitali 2 hours ago
A better link: https://github.com/open-noodle/gallery
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
gnull 4 hours ago
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.
y-c-o-m-b 6 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 5 hours 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
scosman 3 hours ago
Why is the link to a (seemingly) AI summary?
Their page: https://opennoodle.de
Their GitHub: https://github.com/open-noodle/gallery
bastawhiz 6 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 6 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 6 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 5 hours ago
frmersdog 4 hours ago
spunker540 2 hours ago
Mumps 4 hours ago
chekibreki 5 hours 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.
tclancy 3 hours ago
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.
ubertaco 2 hours ago
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.
globular-toast an hour ago
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.
szmarczak 3 hours ago
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).