HN scrutinizes 'Noodle Gallery,' an AI-coded fork of Immich
A self-hosted photo tool pitched as a Google Photos/Immich alternative turns out to be a soft fork of Immich built heavily with LLM assistance.
What to know
- Noodle Gallery was submitted to Hacker News as an independent self-hosted alternative to Google Photos and Immich, but commenters established it is actually a soft fork of Immich, continuously rebased with each Immich release.
- The fork's repo shows heavy reliance on LLM-assisted commits (many signed 'Claude') with no outside contributors, contrasting with upstream Immich's policy of rejecting LLM-generated pull requests — a point of contention over code quality and trust.
- Noodle's differentiators cited by commenters include S3 storage support and changes to partner sharing/face recognition, though its own site frames the comparison via an AI-generated summary page rather than direct documentation.
- The thread also became a venue for broader Immich feedback, including praise for successful Google Photos migrations and criticism of Immich's rigid date-based UI and unclear album/sharing model.
The dispute Whether Noodle Gallery's AI-driven, no-human-review development approach is a disqualifying red flag or simply a different, faster way to add useful features like S3 storage. · positions read across 13 posts and comments
Noodle Gallery is not a true alternative but a fork of Immich, and the submission's framing is misleading.
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“The submitted title's framing "alternative to Google Photos and Immich" is dodgy because this is a soft fork of Immich, adding certain features”
chrismorgan · Hacker News ↗
Heavy LLM/vibe-coded commits with no visible contributors are a red flag for the fork's reliability.
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“I see no contributors and hundreds of commits in a very short amount of time. That's a red flag for now.”
y-c-o-m-b · Hacker News ↗
Immich itself works well for escaping Google Photos, based on direct migration experience.
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“I left Google Photos about 1 year ago or two, used Takeout to export my ~terabyte of Google Photos, imported to Immich on my mac mini”
PStamatiou · Hacker News ↗
xabd HN submitterchrismorgan HN commentery-c-o-m-b HN commentergnull HN commenterjmathai photo management developer/commenterImmich upstream open-source project
How it unfolded 5 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlespostscomments
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5
Users air specific complaints about Immich's design choices
A commenter criticizes Immich's rigid date-based organization and unclear sharing feature, part of a wider thread of Immich critiques and comparisons to alternatives like Ente.
“S3 storage is the killer addition here for me.”
— totetsu, HN commenter · source -
A better link: https://github.com/open-noodle/gallerySeems 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…
2 more of the top 3 · 5 posts in this stretch
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I have great things to say as well. I left Google Photos about 1 year ago or two, used Takeout to export my ~terabyte of Google Photos, imported to Immich on my mac mini, along with more personal archives of photos. I store the images on an external SSD array (https://paulstamatiou.com/gear/owc-express-4m2-nvme-ssd-encl...) that I have backed up…
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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…
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Long-time photo management veteran and users weigh in on Immich itself
Commenters with extensive photo-management or migration experience discuss Immich's real-world use, including successful Google Takeout migrations and self-hosting setups, separate from the Noodle fork debate.
“I've refused to settle for most solutions in this space.”
— jmathai -
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…
2 more of the top 3 · 5 posts in this stretch
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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…
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>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…
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Users flag heavy LLM-driven development as a red flag
Commenters note the repo shows hundreds of commits with no outside contributors and many signed by Claude, and that Noodle explicitly welcomes AI-generated code while Immich's contribution policy forbids LLM-generated PRs.
“I see no contributors and hundreds of commits in a very short amount of time. That's a red flag for now.”
— y-c-o-m-b -
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…
1 more of the top 2 · 2 posts in this stretch
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It's not really an alternative to Immich as the title says, it's a fork that's continuously rebased with each release.
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Commenters identify Noodle Gallery as a fork of Immich, not a standalone alternative
Users point to the project's actual homepage and GitHub repo, noting it is a soft fork of Immich that adds specific features rather than an independent alternative, calling the submission's framing misleading.
“The submitted title's framing "alternative to Google Photos and Immich" is dodgy because this is a soft fork of Immich, adding certain features…”
— chrismorgan -
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
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Noodle Gallery submitted to Hacker News as Google Photos/Immich alternative
A submission titled 'Noodle Gallery- Open-source, self-hosted alternative to Google Photos and Immich' links to digitalescapetools.com, an AI-generated summary page, drawing early comments.
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1 outlet first by HN Frontpage, 2d ago · read ↗
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What people are saying 3 voices from 1 site · best of 13 · verbatim
- Why weren't Noodle Gallery's features contributed upstream to Immich instead of maintaining a separate fork?
- Why does the project link to an AI-generated summary page rather than its own site or GitHub directly?
- Sep 22
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S3 storage is the killer addition here for me. I have been wanting to use Immich for a while, but wanted to use all the spare s3 quota i have lying around rather than pay for storage..
- Sep 21
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Why is the link to a (seemingly) AI summary?Their page: https://opennoodle.deTheir GitHub:
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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.