This Immich fork does what Google Photos still can't

Published Aug 16, 2026, 7:00 PM EDT Dhruv Bhutani has been writing about consumer technology since 2008, offering deep insights into the personal technology landscape through features and opinion pieces. He writes for XDA-Developers, where he focuses on topics like productivity, networking, self-hosting, and more. Over the years, his work has also appeared in leading publications such as Android Police, Android Authority, CNET, PCMag, and more. Outside of his professional work, Dhruv is an avid fan of horror media spanning films and literature, enjoys fitness activities, collects vinyl records, and plays the guitar. Switching over to Immich was one of the best self-hosting 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's got all the essential features like face recognition, albums, and search, and it works well enough that I don't need to look elsewhere. But as good as it is, Immich isn't perfect. Immich was built around the idea of isolated libraries, with some sharing between them through albums or partner sharing. If your photo library is something that you want deeply integrated across user accounts, Immich can't really do that, not yet. This is where Noodle Gallery comes in. This Immich fork builds on Immich, using the same underlying library but adding features aimed at making collaboration and discovery easier. It works on top of your existing image library. Immich's partner sharing and albums fall short As I mentioned earlier, Immich has partner sharing, which is great if you want to share your entire photo library with someone else. Meanwhile, albums let you share specific photographs with other people, but neither is ideal when multiple people are contributing photographs to the same event, like, say, on a vacation. Partner sharing means that my partner has access to all of my photographs. I don't have any secrets, but my personal library tends to be full of random screenshots or work-related photographs that I have taken. I don't want to muck up their timeline with those photos. Meanwhile, an album, by its very definition, belongs to one user. That album doesn't show up in the other person's timeline, and it makes scrolling through hundreds of photographs much harder. Plus, the other users have to retroactively share their images from the event back to the album. There's just too much friction. Noodle Gallery's Shared Spaces solve that problem. It lets you create a space for a specific event or trip, and you can invite everyone who was there. Based on the timelines you define, everyone who was on that trip or was invited has their photos from that timeline automatically shared into this shared space. This lets all those photographs appear together in one shared timeline. It effectively turns your trip into a common library. Think of it like a more advanced version of an album. Beyond that, a Shared Space also lets you search and filter, which Immich simply doesn't allow. With Shared Spaces, you can even add individual albums so you can curate a collection for a group. Similarly, unlike Immich, which gives you basically no control inside an album, Noodle Gallery lets you search, use a map, or even filter by people and locations across everyone's contributed photos. As someone who depends on shared albums for vacation photos and more, this is an invaluable feature that I feel Immich should copy as soon as possible. Better filters make search much more useful Recently added fixes a surprisingly simple problem Sharing and backing up photographs is absolutely a big reason for using a photography service. The other reason is discovery. My photo library spans almost 200,000 photographs, and I know how hard it can be to find what I'm looking for. Let me be clear: Immich's search function is not very good. Noodle Gallery builds on that by adding a much more powerful filtering system. Moreover, these filters are independent, so you can dial things down to keep filtering and showing only relevant results. Similarly, you can type filters directly into the search bar. If you're looking for photos from a specific device or location, or a combination of both, you can type that out. Of course, since Noodle Gallery is built on top of Immich, it also supports text filtering based on descriptions, names, and text captured from photographs through Immich OCR. All these features are available in Shared Spaces too, making it much easier to narrow your search. Noodle Gallery also adds several less obvious features that I'm surprised were missing from Immich to begin with. For example, Immich does not have a recently added tab. It's an unbelievably simple solution to let you see images based on when they were added to the server, rather than when they were captured. I've been archiving old scanned photographs, and a tool like this would easily let me see newly added photographs instead of scrolling 20 years through the timeline. Noodle Gallery gives you that. Similarly, there is storage and backups. While my photographs are backed up onto two different NAS drives, if you want S3-compatible object storage as a backup option, you can do that with Noodle Gallery. The list runs long, but I especially like that the developers have even considered a direct Google Takeout import solution. Noodle Gallery fixes the gaps in Immich The point of this article is not to list out every single feature in Noodle Gallery. That would take too long. Nor is Noodle Gallery perfect. In fact, the app is far from perfect. By the developer's own admission, the app is largely vibe-coded, which makes me wary of having it as my default. That said, there's a lot to learn here for Immich. Most of the features covered are borderline essentials in a serious photo management app, and I would love to see these ported over to Immich as soon as possible. Until then, if you're comfortable with an AI-developed app that genuinely builds on Immich's excellent codebase, Noodle Gallery is absolutely worth a shot. Noodle Gallery Noodle Gallery is an Immich fork that adds collaborative features, more powerful search and filters to the photo gallery app.