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.