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.

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/.

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

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.

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.

Why is the link to a (seemingly) AI summary?

Their page: https://opennoodle.de

Their GitHub: https://github.com/open-noodle/gallery

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

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.

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).

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