High performance self-hosted photo and video management solution

Install in 5 minutes · Try the live demo

Note

This is a community fork of Immich with additional features and improvements. Currently based on Immich v2.7.5. We regularly sync with upstream to stay up to date. See What's Different below.

Tip

Noodle Gallery mobile apps are out! Back up your photos and browse your library on the go. Download on the App Store · Get it on Google Play

Tip

Already running Immich? Switching to Gallery is a three-line config change — two image names in your docker-compose.yml and IMMICH_VERSION=v4 in your .env. Your library and database are fully compatible. See the install guide.

Not for you? A one-command switch-back script cleans up Gallery-specific tables and columns and puts you back on upstream Immich. Your photos and videos never move.

What's Different from Upstream Immich

Gallery is a friendly fork that rebases onto every upstream Immich release, so every fix, performance improvement, and new feature from the Immich team lands here automatically. On top of that foundation, Gallery adds the features below — grouped the way the Noodle Gallery vs Immich comparison frames them: each is an additive answer to a place where upstream runs out of room. Every feature has a feature page, and most have a docs page too.

People and identity

Immich's face recognition is account-scoped — the same person shows up as a separate entry in your library, your partner's, and every shared album you both touch.

• Global People — identity-aware people, filters, and search results dedupe across your personal library and every timeline-enabled Shared Space you can access, without ever crossing a permission boundary you weren't already on the right side of. Naming, merging, and birthdays stay scoped to where they were entered, while the identity layer underneath connects what is provably the same person.

Sharing and collaboration

Partner Sharing is all-or-nothing and albums belong to whoever made them — there's no combined family timeline, no activity log, and no way to bulk-share tens of thousands of photos by hand.

• Shared Spaces — multi-owner collaborative timelines with Owner / Editor / Viewer roles, cross-contributor face recognition, per-member timeline integration, last-visit tracking, and a per-space activity log. Photos are linked by reference at zero extra storage cost, each contributor keeps their own library, and there's full web + mobile parity. (Docs)
• Spaces Filtering — the full filter suite (date, people, location, camera, tags) scoped to a single Space, not just the main library.
• User Groups — named, color-coded groups for one-click sharing; pick a whole circle when inviting to a Space or sharing an album instead of selecting people one at a time. (Docs)
• Bulk Add to Spaces — add hundreds of thousands of photos to a Space with one click, processed in the background so the UI never blocks.

Search and discovery

Each page has its own search bar with no keyboard-first global entry point, smart-search results can't be sorted or threshold-tuned, filters operate in isolation, and the map has no filter panel of its own.

• Timeline Grouping — a Years / Months / All switcher on every timeline (Photos, Spaces, Albums, People, Map). Tap a year or month card to zoom into that period without restricting the query, and your scroll position is preserved when you switch back — find a photo fast even in a decades-deep library.
• Inline Search Filters — type structured filters (people, tags, dates, locations, ratings, media type, favorites, cameras, album gaps) straight into the search bar with live suggestions before you press Enter, committing to shareable URL state.
• Global Search — Cmd/Ctrl+K is the main search surface, routing the top result back into Photos and Spaces while still searching people, places, tags, albums, commands, and settings pages in parallel. (Docs)
• Search Palette — the keyboard-first command palette behind global search. Prefix shortcuts (@ people, # tags, / albums & spaces, > commands) scope to one kind of result, and context-aware page commands expose rename / share / add-member / delete on the album or space you're viewing — with a two-step inline confirm before anything destructive fires. (Docs)
• Search Sorting & Relevance — sort smart-search results by relevance, newest, or oldest, with date-grouped infinite scroll and a tunable similarity threshold so combined text + filter searches stop returning noise.
• Interdependent Filtering — every filter narrows every other filter. Select a country and only see the cameras, people, and tags that exist in those photos — no dead-end combinations. (Docs)
• Smart Search & Contextual Filters — full-text and CLIP search inside Spaces, with filter suggestions that adapt to your current selection.
• Map Filtering — the full filter panel from Photos and Spaces, now on the Map view, with markers updating in real time and space-aware suggestions. (Docs)

AI and automation

Immich's AI surface is focused on faces and basic CLIP search — pets aren't detected, memories show only "On This Day", there's no automated clutter suppression, and duplicate detection misses re-encoded videos.

• Auto-Classification — define what clutter looks like (screenshots, memes, receipts) and Gallery tags and optionally archives matching photos automatically using CLIP, each category with its own similarity threshold. Per-user, and runs on the same pipeline as smart search. (Docs)
• Memories Archive — a dedicated Memories page for retained generated memories, with local search, an All/Saved filter, and admin controls for how long generated memories are kept. (Docs)
• Smarter Memories — server-side rules supplement "On This Day" with recent-trip recaps (detected from location clusters outside your baseline) and birthday memories that adapt to each person's photo history, with titles and subtitles rendered on web and mobile. (Docs)
• Pet Detection — YOLO11 detects dogs, cats, birds, and other animals and surfaces them alongside people; browse by individual pet, toggle pets per space, and pick from three model sizes. (Docs)
• Video Duplicate Detection — extends upstream's photo dedup to videos by averaging CLIP embeddings across sampled frames, catching duplicates even after re-encoding, resizing, or format conversion. (Docs)

Media management and migration

Trimming a video means exporting to an external tool, moving from Google Photos needs CLI scripts, storage is local disk or external libraries with no native S3 backend, and a large existing library can't be linked into a shared collection.

• Image Editing — non-destructive rotation and cropping from the asset viewer (keyboard shortcuts [ / ]), batch rotate across a selection, and automatic thumbnail refresh; originals are always preserved and full 360° rotations auto-revert. (Docs)
• Video Trimming — cut clips in the browser with a timeline scrubber. FFmpeg stream copy means instant, lossless results, and you can re-trim or restore the original at any time. (Docs)
• Connected Libraries — link external photo libraries to Shared Spaces so thousands of existing photos appear instantly, with no file duplication and originals left untouched. (Docs)
• Google Photos Import — a guided in-browser wizard for Google Takeout archives that preserves dates, GPS coordinates, descriptions, favorite/archived status, and album structure (including .supplemental-metadata.json sidecars) — no CLI required. (Docs)
• S3-Compatible Storage — store media on any S3-compatible backend (AWS S3, MinIO, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Wasabi). Disk and S3 run simultaneously, with redirect or proxy delivery modes and a built-in storage migration tool to move files in either direction with resume and rollback. (Docs)

Mobile

Filtering the timeline in the Immich mobile app means switching to a separate tab and losing your scroll position, and advanced surfaces sit deeper in the app or aren't there at all.

• Photos Filtering on Mobile — a three-snap bottom sheet on the Photos tab filters the timeline by people, places, tags, dates, rating, and media type without ever leaving the grid.
• Noodle Gallery for iPhone — a native iOS app on the App Store with background camera backup, on-device CLIP search, the map view, and a Shared Spaces preview, all talking directly to your own server. (Docs)
• Noodle Gallery for Android — the same native app, live on Google Play with background camera backup, on-device CLIP search, the map, and Shared Spaces. (Docs)

Operations

• Structured JSON logging — opt-in JSON log output (IMMICH_LOG_FORMAT=json) for clean integration with log aggregation systems like Grafana Loki, the ELK Stack, Datadog, or Splunk.

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Switching to This Fork

Switching is simple — just change your Docker image names. Your existing database, configuration, and media files are fully compatible.

Step 1: Back Up Your Database

Important

Always back up your database before switching. This allows you to revert to upstream Immich if needed.

docker exec -t immich_postgres pg_dumpall -c -U postgres | gzip > immich-db-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d).sql.gz

Step 2: Update Your Docker Compose File

Set the version in your .env file:

IMMICH_VERSION=v4

Change the image references in your docker-compose.yml:

services:
  immich-server:
-   image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-server:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release}
+   image: ghcr.io/open-noodle/gallery-server:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release}

  immich-machine-learning:
-   image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-machine-learning:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release}
+   image: ghcr.io/open-noodle/gallery-ml:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release}

For NVIDIA GPU acceleration on the ML container, use the -cuda tag variant:

image: ghcr.io/open-noodle/gallery-ml:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release}-cuda

Step 3: Restart

docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

That's it. To switch back to upstream Immich later, flip the two image names back and either restore your database backup or run the automated switch-back script, which drops Gallery-specific tables, columns, and migration records — shared spaces, pet detection, classifications, duplicate data — leaving a plain upstream Immich database. Your photos and videos are never touched.

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Warning

Always follow 3-2-1 backup plan for your precious photos and videos!

Note

You can find the full documentation at https://docs.opennoodle.de/.

Links

• Website
• Documentation
• Installation
• API Documentation — interactive Swagger UI with all endpoints including fork-specific ones. Also available on your own instance at /doc
• Roadmap
• Features

Features

Features	Mobile	Web
Upload and view videos and photos	Yes	Yes
Auto backup when the app is opened	Yes	N/A
Prevent duplication of assets	Yes	Yes
Selective album(s) for backup	Yes	N/A
Download photos and videos to local device	Yes	Yes
Multi-user support	Yes	Yes
Album and Shared albums	Yes	Yes
Scrubbable/draggable scrollbar	Yes	Yes
Support raw formats	Yes	Yes
Metadata view (EXIF, map)	Yes	Yes
Search by metadata, objects, faces, and CLIP	Yes	Yes
Administrative functions (user management)	No	Yes
Background backup	Yes	N/A
Virtual scroll	Yes	Yes
OAuth support	Yes	Yes
API Keys	N/A	Yes
LivePhoto/MotionPhoto backup and playback	Yes	Yes
Support 360 degree image display	No	Yes
User-defined storage structure	Yes	Yes
Public Sharing	Yes	Yes
Archive and Favorites	Yes	Yes
Global Map	Yes	Yes
Partner Sharing	Yes	Yes
Facial recognition and clustering	Yes	Yes
Memories (x years ago, birthdays, trips)	Yes	Yes
Offline support	Yes	No
Read-only gallery	Yes	Yes
Stacked Photos	Yes	Yes
Tags	No	Yes
Folder View	Yes	Yes
Shared Spaces	Yes	Yes
Smart Search & Filters	No	Yes
Search Palette (Cmd+K)	No	Yes
User Groups	No	Yes
Auto-Classification	No	Yes
Video Duplicate Detection	No	Yes
Pet Detection	Yes	Yes
Google Photos Import	No	Yes
Image Editing & Video Trimming	No	Yes
S3-Compatible Storage	Yes	Yes

Translations

Read more about translations here.

Docker Images

Pre-built Docker images are published to GitHub Container Registry (GHCR) under the open-noodle organization.

Available Images

Image	Description
ghcr.io/open-noodle/gallery-server	Server + web UI + CLI (all-in-one)
ghcr.io/open-noodle/gallery-ml	Machine learning service (CPU)
ghcr.io/open-noodle/gallery-ml:*-cuda	Machine learning service (NVIDIA CUDA)

Tags

• release / release-cuda — most recent published build (like upstream's release tag)
• v4 — floats to the latest v4.x.x release (set IMMICH_VERSION=v4 to auto-update within major version)
• v4.2.6 — pinned version using semantic versioning

Publishing

Gallery maintainers ship releases via manually-triggered GitHub Actions workflows — the full two-phase (mobile + server) flow and the server-only fast path are documented in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Contributing

Gallery is a community fork and contributions are welcome — bug fixes, features, docs, translations. Come say hi on Discord if you want to chat about an idea before diving in.

Setting Up a Dev Environment

The repo is a pnpm workspace monorepo — server (NestJS), web (SvelteKit), mobile (Flutter), machine-learning (Python), and a few supporting packages. The dev stack runs in Docker Compose with live reload for the server and web.

Prerequisites: Docker, Docker Compose, Node.js 22+, and pnpm.

1. Fork and clone the repo

   git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/gallery.git
   cd gallery

2. Copy the example env file

   cp docker/example.env docker/.env

   The defaults work out of the box for local development. Adjust UPLOAD_LOCATION and DB_DATA_LOCATION if you want to store data somewhere other than the repo directory.

3. Install dependencies

   pnpm install

   This installs deps for every workspace package (server, web, cli, sdk, e2e).

4. Start the dev stack

   make dev

   This brings up Postgres, Redis, the ML service, the server (with hot reload), and the web UI on http://localhost:2283. The first run downloads ML models and builds containers, so give it a few minutes.

Running Tests and Checks Before You Push

# Server
cd server && pnpm test          # unit tests
cd server && pnpm check         # TypeScript type check

# Web
cd web && pnpm test             # unit tests
cd web && pnpm check            # svelte-check + tsc

# All modules from the repo root
make check-all                  # type checks everywhere
make format-all                 # prettier --write

CI runs lint, type checks, unit tests, and e2e tests on every PR. If you're touching server controllers or repositories, regenerate the OpenAPI clients and SQL query files:

make open-api                   # regenerates TS SDK + Dart client
make sql                        # regenerates SQL query docs (needs DB running)

Opening a Pull Request

• Branch off main and keep PRs focused on one change.
• Follow Conventional Commits for your commit messages (feat:, fix:, docs:, chore:, etc.) — the release workflow uses them to compute version bumps.
• Include a short description of what changed and why, plus screenshots or screen recordings for UI work.
• Make sure CI is green before requesting review.

Acknowledgements

This software is developed with strong assistance from AI (Codex/Claude Code) and with humans leading the ideas, testing, and debugging. We say this openly because it shaped how the project was built. If you are not happy with AI-developed code, this software is not for you. The acknowledgement below is equally important: this would not exist without Immich, largely written by hand.

See CLAUDE.md for a deeper tour of the codebase architecture and common commands.