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

Commenters debated Noodle Gallery, a soft fork of Immich, and whether it genuinely offers a better self-hosted alternative to Google Photos. Some, like jmathai, praised Immich’s maturity and open-source quality and saw Noodle as an understandable soft fork that experiments with missing features. Chrismorgan and bastawhiz emphasized that Noodle is continuously rebased on Immich rather than a wholly separate product. Others framed the discussion around practical feature gaps: y-c-o-m-b and Firerouge highlighted partner sharing, face-recognition overhead, and other “common sense” additions that Noodle attempts to solve, while passive said Immich looked like a good step for leaving Google Photos.

Opinion divides sharply on development practices and trust. Several commenters (gnull, ubtertaco, y-c-o-m-b) worried that Noodle’s rapid commits and encouragement of LLM-assisted coding indicate “vibe-coding” and raise code-quality and sustainability concerns; gnull contrasted Immich’s stricter LLM policy. Deeds67, the main contributor, defended the project, explaining the rebasing workflow, code review, and an easy rollback to upstream Immich. Members of the Immich team (bo0tzz) and skeptical users argued that certain changes belong upstream and that forks driven by AI tooling deserve extra scrutiny before adoption.