How Gallery and Immich relate
Noodle Gallery is a friendly fork of Immich, the open-source self-hosted photo management platform built by Alex Tran and a growing community of contributors. Gallery rebases onto every upstream Immich release, so every bug fix, performance improvement, and new feature from the Immich team lands in Gallery automatically.
The relationship is intentionally simple: Immich is the foundation. Gallery sits on top of it and adds a small number of features for use cases that wouldn't fit upstream's scope. Same database, same containers, same migration path back. If you change your mind, swapping back to upstream is a three-line change.
This page exists because people coming from Immich legitimately ask "what's different?", and the answer is worth being clear about — not because we think upstream is worse.
What Gallery adds on top of Immich
Gallery includes 18 features that aren't part of upstream Immich. Each one was built to solve a specific itch — usually around shared use, advanced filtering, or media management.
Mobile
- 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 Gallery server.
Shared and collaborative features
- Shared Spaces — collaborative photo libraries where multiple users contribute to the same chronological timeline. Each contributor's additions are tracked independently.
- Spaces Filtering — full filter suite (date, people, location, camera, tags) inside shared spaces, not just the main library.
- User Groups — named, colour-coded groups for one-click sharing. Invite an entire group to a Space at once.
- Bulk Add to Spaces — add hundreds of thousands of photos to a Space with one click, processed in the background.
Search and discovery
- Search Palette — a keyboard-first command palette opens with Cmd/Ctrl+K from anywhere and searches photos, people, places, tags, and every settings page in parallel, with a Top result band that turns the obvious match into a one-shot Enter.
- Search Sorting & Relevance — sort smart search results by date or relevance, 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 cameras, people, and tags that exist in those photos.
- Smart Search & Contextual Filters — natural-language search inside Spaces, with filter suggestions that adapt to your current selection.
- Map Filtering — the full filter panel from Photos, now on the Map view. Markers update in real time.
AI and automation
- Pet Detection — YOLO11 recognises dogs, cats, birds, and other animals automatically. Browse by individual pet.
- Auto-Classification — define what clutter looks like (screenshots, memes, receipts) and Gallery tags and archives them automatically using CLIP.
- Video Duplicate Detection — find duplicate videos even after re-encoding, resizing, or format conversion.
Media and migration
- Image Editing — non-destructive crop, rotate, and adjust directly in the browser, with batch support.
- Video Trimming — trim videos losslessly with stream copy. Zero quality loss, near-instant processing.
- Connected Libraries — link external photo libraries to Shared Spaces so thousands of photos appear instantly.
- Google Photos Import — a guided wizard to import Google Takeout archives directly from the browser.
- S3-Compatible Storage — use AWS S3, MinIO, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, or any S3-compatible backend.
Feature comparison
| Upstream Immich | Noodle Gallery | |
|---|---|---|
| Core photo features | Yes — the same foundation | Yes — Gallery rebases onto every release |
| iPhone app | Native Immich app on the App Store | Plus a dedicated Noodle Gallery iPhone app on the App Store |
| Shared timelines with multiple contributors | Albums and partner sharing | Plus Shared Spaces with full filtering |
| Pet detection | Not included | YOLO11-based, automatic |
| Keyboard command palette | Classic search bar only | Plus a Cmd/Ctrl+K palette across photos, people, places, tags, and every settings page |
| Smart search sorting & relevance threshold | Default relevance order | Plus sort by date, date-grouped scroll, and tunable similarity threshold |
| Interdependent / faceted filtering | Standard filters | Plus filters that narrow each other in real time |
| Map view filtering | Map view available | Plus full filter panel on the map itself |
| S3-compatible storage backend | Local disk and external libraries | Plus AWS S3, MinIO, R2, B2, Wasabi |
| Google Takeout import wizard | CLI tools | Plus an in-browser guided wizard |
| Image editing in browser | External tools | Plus non-destructive crop, rotate, adjust |
| Video trimming in browser | External tools | Plus lossless stream-copy trimming |
Notice the pattern: every Gallery feature is plus what Immich already does. Gallery starts from upstream and adds on top — never replaces, never strips out.
Should you stick with upstream Immich?
There are real, substantive reasons to run upstream Immich instead of the fork. These aren't token bullet points — these are genuine cases where upstream is the right call.
Community size and track record
Immich has been in active development since 2022, has tens of thousands of GitHub stars, hundreds of contributors, and a large active Discord. Gallery has a small team and a much shorter track record. If you value the comfort of a large community where any question has been answered already, upstream is the right place to be.
Broader platform testing
Upstream Immich has been deployed on every conceivable hardware combination — Raspberry Pis, Synology NAS units, Unraid, TrueNAS, Docker on Windows via WSL2, bare-metal Kubernetes, you name it. Gallery has tested fewer combinations. If you're running an unusual setup, upstream's broader test surface helps.
You don't need any of the additions
The honest reason most people should stick with upstream: if you don't need Shared Spaces, Pet Detection, S3 storage, the Google Takeout wizard, or advanced filtering, then upstream Immich already does everything you want. Gallery exists to add features for specific use cases — and if those use cases aren't yours, upstream is leaner, simpler, and has more eyes on it.
Migrating from Immich is a three-line change
If you're already running Immich and you want to try Gallery, the migration is
trivial. Swap two image names in your docker-compose.yml and bump
IMMICH_VERSION in your .env. The current version is
v4.
image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-server:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release} image: ghcr.io/open-noodle/gallery-server:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release} image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-machine-learning:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release} image: ghcr.io/open-noodle/gallery-ml:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release} IMMICH_VERSION=release IMMICH_VERSION=v4 Then pull the new images and restart:
docker compose pull && docker compose up -dNo data migration. No database conversion. No file copying. Your library lives in exactly the same place — Gallery reads and writes the same files Immich was using, against the same Postgres database, on the same volume.
docker exec -t your-db-container pg_dumpall -U postgres > backup.sql Full step-by-step guide on the install page. See the migration walkthrough →
Gallery ships a cleanup SQL that drops every Gallery-specific table, column, and migration record — shared spaces, pet detection, classifications, duplicate data — leaving a plain upstream Immich database. Your photos and videos are never touched. Flip the two image names back and you're on upstream.
Read the switch-back guideGallery's job is to make a small set of additional features available without making you choose between them and the Immich roadmap.
Frequently asked questions
Is my data safe if I move from Immich to Noodle Gallery?
Yes. Gallery uses the same database schema, the same upload directory layout, and the same file formats as upstream Immich. The migration is two image-name changes in your docker-compose.yml. Your library is never copied, transformed, or rewritten — Gallery just reads and writes the same files Immich was using.
Can I switch back to upstream Immich later?
Yes, the same way you came in. Run Gallery's cleanup script to drop every Gallery-specific table, column, and migration record from the database — your photos and videos are never touched — then swap the two image names back to ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-server and ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-machine-learning, run docker compose pull, and you're back on upstream. Gallery is designed so the door always swings both ways.
Will Gallery diverge from Immich over time?
No, that's the opposite of the goal. Gallery rebases onto every upstream Immich release, so every bug fix, performance improvement, and new feature from the Immich team lands in Gallery automatically. Gallery's exclusive features are additive — they sit on top of upstream, not in place of it.
How quickly does Gallery rebase after a new Immich release?
Usually within a few days. The rebase process is automated where possible and manual where needed; the goal is to stay close enough that running Gallery feels like running a slightly enhanced Immich, not a separate project.
Does Gallery have a mobile app?
Yes. The Noodle Gallery iPhone app is live on the App Store with background camera backup, on-device CLIP search, the map view, and a Shared Spaces preview. An Android build is right behind it. The upstream Immich apps also continue to work with Gallery servers via the shared API if you'd rather use those.
Why fork at all instead of upstreaming features?
Several Gallery-exclusive features (Shared Spaces, Pet Detection, contextual filters) were either declined upstream, considered out of scope, or required architectural changes that wouldn't have fit Immich's roadmap. Forking lets us experiment without slowing down the upstream team — and rebasing means we never lose touch with their progress.
A note on the upstream Immich team
Noodle Gallery exists because Immich exists. We owe everything to the upstream team — the architecture, the database design, the mobile apps, the CLIP integration, the relentless pace of releases. If you find Gallery useful, please also star, sponsor, or contribute to immich-app/immich. Without their work, none of this would be possible.