Switching to Immich was one of the best decisions I made. It gives me the convenience of Google Photos while giving me full ownership of my data by running on my NAS. It has all the essential features like face recognition, albums, and search. But as good as it is, Immich is not perfect[reference:77].
Sharing between users through albums or partner sharing works, but if you want a photo library deeply integrated across multiple user accounts, Immich cannot really do that. Not yet. This is where Noodle Gallery comes in[reference:78].
Shared Spaces solve the collaboration problem
Immich has partner sharing, which is great if you want to share your entire photo library with someone else. Albums let you share specific photographs. But neither is ideal when multiple people are contributing photos to the same event, like a vacation[reference:79].
Partner sharing means my partner has access to all of my photographs. I do not have secrets, but my personal library is full of random screenshots and work-related photos. I do not want to muck up their timeline with those[reference:80]. An album belongs to one user. It does not show up in the other person's timeline, and scrolling through hundreds of photos is harder. Other users have to retroactively share their images back to the album. Too much friction[reference:81].
Noodle Gallery's Shared Spaces solve this. You create a space for a specific event or trip and invite everyone who was there. Based on the timelines you define, everyone who was on that trip has their photos from that timeline automatically shared into the space[reference:82]. All the photos appear together in one shared timeline. It effectively turns your trip into a common library. Beyond that, a Shared Space also lets you search and filter, which Immich simply does not allow[reference:83].
With Shared Spaces, you can even add individual albums to curate a collection for a group. Unlike Immich, which gives you basically no control inside an album, Noodle Gallery lets you search, use a map, or filter by people and locations across everyone's contributed photos[reference:84].
Better discovery and search
My photo library spans almost 200,000 photographs. Finding what I am looking for is hard. Immich's search function is not very good. Noodle Gallery adds a much more powerful filtering system[reference:85]. The filters are independent, so you can dial things down to show only relevant results. You can also type filters directly into the search bar[reference:86].
If you are looking for photos from a specific device or location, or a combination of both, you can type that out. Noodle Gallery also supports text filtering based on AI-generated descriptions[reference:87]. All these features are available in Shared Spaces too[reference:88].
Missing features that should have been there
Noodle Gallery adds several features that I am surprised were missing from Immich. For example, Immich does not have a recently added tab. It is an incredibly simple solution to see images based on when they were added to the server, rather than when they were captured[reference:89]. I have been archiving old scanned photographs, and a tool like this would let me see newly added photos instead of scrolling 20 years through the timeline. Noodle Gallery gives you that[reference:90].
For storage and backups, Noodle Gallery supports S3-compatible object storage as a backup option. The developers have even considered a direct Google Takeout import solution[reference:91].
The catch
Noodle Gallery is not perfect. By the developer's own admission, the app is largely AI-developed[reference:92]. That makes me wary of having it as my default. But there is a lot to learn here for Immich. Most of the features covered are borderline essentials in a serious photo management app[reference:93]. Until Immich ports these over, if you are comfortable with an AI-developed app that builds on an excellent codebase, Noodle Gallery is absolutely worth a shot[reference:94].