Android Authority Writer Says Noodle Gallery Beats Immich for Family Photo Sharing

According to the article, Immich is strong at managing individual photo libraries. The writer used it to keep photos from an SLR, back up phone photos automatically and search through years of images without handing them to Google. For a family library, however, the writer says Immich is not always strong. Sharing a portion of a library is extremely hard, and sharing certain aspects of the library, such as metadata, is not supported. Immich offers shared albums, the article says, but users cannot search shared albums or share facial recognition results, which the writer calls basic.

Noodle Gallery is described as an open-source fork built on top of Immich. It keeps the parts of Immich the writer already liked and adds features aimed at families and people who share photo libraries. The writer has run it for the past month and says it quickly became the preferred way to manage photos at home.

The switch is presented as a drop-in replacement. If Immich is already running, users can change the container images in their Docker Compose file, keep the same database and bring existing photos, albums and other data along. The project also provides a way to switch back to Immich. Because Noodle Gallery reads the image processing database created by Immich, the writer says it is basically ready to go from the start.

After logging in, the article says, Noodle Gallery feels familiar. The timeline, mobile experience and general layout are recognizably Immich. The mobile apps are effectively a fork of Immich, so families do not have to learn an entirely new photo app because the server software changed.

The feature that convinced the writer to keep Noodle Gallery is Shared Spaces. Users can create a shared timeline for a trip, wedding, birthday or other event. Everyone can contribute their photos while keeping their own personal library. The result is a single timeline containing everyone's photos without forcing anyone to give up control of their own library. Instead of asking someone to send photos or manually adding pictures to an album and then making sure they show up for everyone, people can contribute individual photos or full albums to the same Space. For a family server, the writer says this creates a unified timeline and a large efficiency improvement.

Another addition is Global People. Immich can recognize faces well for a self-hosted service, according to the article, but Noodle Gallery allows people to be recognized across personal libraries and Shared Spaces. If someone has already been identified, that identity can carry across the places where the user and others are allowed to see the photos. The writer gives an example of having thousands of family photos while a partner has thousands more. Rather than treating those libraries as completely isolated, Noodle Gallery can connect the same person across them while respecting permissions. The writer says this makes facial recognition useful across shared libraries rather than only individual accounts, and helps filter a shared timeline with thousands of photos by the people in them.