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 space. Even when I adopted using Google Photos, it was as a read only viewer of my canonical photo library (I wasn't about to let Google take that responsibility). I have such high demands of whatever software I use for managing my photos and videos - they're really the only digital files I actually care about.
Immich is absolutely wonderful. It may have some shortcomings ... like partner sharing and sharing facial recognition between users. But man is it remarkable that an open source project can rival something from Google in terms of quality and experience.
And a soft fork like Noodle is precisely the way to handle it. I am perfectly happy with Immich so am not a user of Noodle. But it's open source flexing its strength.
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 with Restic+Backrest to some cloud providers.
My mac mini hosts it behind tailscale to all my devices and it's been working great.
A tweet of yours a decade ago convinced me to add Google Photos into my workflow (thanks).
https://medium.com/swlh/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-go...
I removed it from my workflow when its integration with Drive was sunset.
I was without a great UI for a couple years, paying attention to Immich in my periphery. I decided to add Immich this year on a Mac Mini as well.
https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...
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.
There's plenty of tutorials but you can request a Google Takeout of your photos and then point immich-go at it. I can confirm that this works really well.
https://takeout.google.com/?pli=1 https://github.com/simulot/immich-go
The problem with google takeout is that it generates hundred of files to download as ZIP. I tried it in my own collection (800GB).
Agree - it's annoying. rclone to the rescue. Requires choosing Google Drive as the destination and then downloading with rclone to your computer. It's the closest to sane I've found.
https://metadatafixer.com/learn/how-to-download-google-takeo...
Claude made a PHP script for me that did API to Google Photos and pulls them all to my archive location.
I struggled with Immich, I didn't like the rclone option. I'm intending to go back to Immich but my first priority was to get the stuff out of Google. That's done, so with all my free time (ha!) I can get the family Immich going.
Nice. The PHP script could also write metadata back into the photo so it gets extracted by Immich on import. Just an additional prompt :)
I was planning on having Immich read from my archive. Then Immich on the phones sends right there (VPN?) and skips G all together. But maybe I'll end up with Amdroid->Google->PHP->Immich
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 sharing? It can't be albums because an album would be a series of photos you yourself arranged, independent of when the photos were taken, and this seems a completely foreign concept in Immich land.
Did you also look at https://ente.com/ ?
I was going to recommend ente as well.
My photos and videos are the most important files I have in my self-hosted storage system. Being end-to-end encrypted buys some peace of mind knowing that it's not end of world if my homelab is compromised. And I can backup the data to whatever public clouds without worrying too much about leaking data.
>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 always first.
In my experience, most open source photo apps lacked basic features like facial recognition, mobile apps, etc. And where they do exist, the UX isn't the best. Are there ones I'm unaware of?
I say this as someone whose last startup (circa 2012) was an open source photo app (https://github.com/photo/frontend).
I think it's a testament to how far computers have come that identifying the individuals in a photograph is now considered a basic feature.
The Kano Model customer satisfaction theory:
https://ixdf.org/literature/article/the-kano-model-a-tool-to...