I used Immich for years, but this self-hosted Google Photos alternative is better

I’ve had Immich running on my home server for the past three years. It’s a self-hosting essential for me as I try to offload as much of my backups and services from the cloud as possible. It’s where I keep the photos from my SLR, where my phone backs up photos automatically, and where I can search through years of images without handing everything over to Google. For a self-hosted alternative to Google Photos, there’s little doubt that Immich is the go-to for most.

But as good as Immich is, as an enthusiast, I was bound to run into limitations. Immich is great at managing individual photo libraries, but it isn’t always great at managing a family’s photo library. If you’re trying to share a portion of your library, Immich makes it extremely hard. And you can absolutely forget about sharing certain aspects of the library, like metadata.

Noodle Gallery is an open-source fork built on top of Immich. It keeps the things I already like about Immich while adding a bunch of features aimed at families and people who actually share their photo libraries. I’ve been running it for the past month, and it has quickly become my preferred way to manage photos at home.

The biggest reason I was willing to try Noodle Gallery was that I didn’t have to start over. If you’ve already got Immich running, Noodle Gallery is designed as a drop-in replacement. You can change the container images in your Docker Compose file, keep the same database, and bring your existing photos, albums, and other data along with you. The project even provides a way to switch back to Immich if you change your mind.

This makes experimentation very easy, and, more importantly, quick. Since Noodle Gallery reads the image processing database created by Immich, you are basically ready to go from the get-go.

And once you log in, Noodle Gallery feels very familiar. The timeline, mobile experience, and general layout are all recognizably Immich. Even the mobile apps are effectively a fork of Immich, so you don’t have to teach your family an entirely new photo app just because you’ve changed what’s running on the server.

As the custodian of my family’s photo archive, the monumental task of sorting, segregating, and sharing family vacations with the rest of my family falls on me. This basically means that I have to manage a multi-terabyte image archive and create sets of photos of family vacations, festivals, or just shared moments with all these individuals. Immich doesn’t support anything beyond shared albums. In fact, you can’t even search shared albums, nor do you have any facial recognition sharing. Calling it basic would be an understatement.

Shared Spaces is the feature that convinced me to keep Noodle Gallery around. You can create a shared timeline for a trip, wedding, birthday, or any other event. Everyone can contribute their photos while still keeping their own personal library. The result is a single timeline containing everyone’s photos, without forcing everyone to give up control of their own library.

That sounds like a big difference compared to a shared album, but it changes how you actually use a self-hosted photo server.

Instead of constantly asking someone to send you photos, or manually adding pictures to an album so that you can then make sure those photos show up for everyone, everyone can simply contribute individual photos or full albums to the same Space. For a family server, that’s a huge improvement in efficiency as it creates a single unified timeline of events for a shared events.

Another clever addition is Global People. Immich can recognize faces very well as far as self-hosted services go, but Noodle Gallery takes the idea further by allowing people to be recognized across personal libraries and Shared Spaces. If you’ve already identified someone, that identity can carry across the places where you and others are allowed to see the photos.

Say I have thousands of photos of my family, and my partner has thousands more. Instead of treating those libraries as completely isolated libraries, Noodle Gallery can connect the same person across them, while still respecting permissions.

This might not sound like a big deal if you run a solo library, but when you have a shared timeline of thousands of photos, you need better ways to filter images. For me, picking images based on people in them tends to be one of the fastest ways to achieve that. Right now, Immich offers no way to achieve that across shared libraries. Noodle Gallery, on the other hand, makes it as easy as tapping the names of anyone who has been identified already. Moreover, shared facial recognition data means that if you have image duplicates across multiple users, the server doesn’t have to work double-time to identify those photos.

Noodle Gallery isn’t just about family sharing. It adds a surprisingly long list of smaller improvements that make it feel like the supercharged version of Immich that it is. For one, its search is particularly good. You can use natural-language search to find things in your library, while the global search lets you jump to people, places, tags, albums, and settings using simple shortcuts.

There are also better memories, including automatically generated recaps for recent trips and birthdays. Pet detection can identify cats, dogs, and other animals, giving you another way to browse your library. This last one is notable because Immich doesn’t do pet detection just yet.

The app also supports non-destructive photo editing, including cropping and rotating, as well as video trimming without re-encoding the entire file. It can even find duplicate videos based on visual similarity, which is useful when you’ve accumulated multiple compressed versions of the same clip over the years. This uses a local CLIP model, so you’ll need a somewhat beefy server to get meaningful output. But I’m glad that the feature is available.

It also solves one more problem that I’m sure most of us face. Not everything in my camera roll is actually a memory. Between screenshots, receipts, parking tickets, and random pictures of things I might need later, there’s a lot of clutter that ends up mixed in with photos I actually care about. Noodle Gallery has an Auto-Classification feature that can identify this kind of clutter and automatically tag or archive it. You can tell it what counts as clutter, and its AI-based classification system handles the sorting for you.

With around 300,000 images on my server, there’s just no way I’m ever going to be able to clean it up manually. That’s where the AI-based classification comes in clutch. I wouldn’t ever trust it to delete images on its own, but tagging and archiving means that I can comfortably step in every few weeks or months and pull out any false positives.

And if you’re the sort of person who has accumulated a truly ridiculous amount of storage, or is looking for a secondary cloud-based backup, Noodle Gallery supports S3-compatible storage, so your library doesn’t necessarily have to live entirely on the local server. You’ve got the option to back it up to Glacier, or any other S3-compatible object storage service.

I’m sure the first question on your mind is whether it is worth switching from Immich. The answer to that is fairly simple. If you’re running Immich by yourself and don’t really share photos with anyone, I wouldn’t rush to switch. Immich remains an excellent self-hosted photo platform. There are still some quality-of-life additions in Noodle Gallery, but none of those are essentials in my opinion.

But if you’re running a server for a family, Noodle Gallery makes a much stronger case. I’ve only scratched the surface as far as the feature set is concerned, but already it’s made a dramatic improvement in how I manage my photo sharing workflow.

The reality is that shared libraries are rarely neatly segregated collections, and sharing images is a constant hassle. Noodle Gallery’s Shared Spaces, global face recognition, and automatic organization go a long way toward making it easier. And because it’s built on Immich, it benefits from every Immich upgrade and offers an innately familiar interface.

After three years of using Immich, I wasn’t expecting to find myself preferring another self-hosted photo platform. But the reality is, I do. Noodle Gallery is Immich, but better, and it fixes a lot of my gripes with the software while giving me everything that made me like it in the first place.