Flickr vs Noodle Gallery

Flickr is an online photography community for managing, sharing, and discovering photos. Users can store and organize images, make galleries, and explore galleries from photographers they follow. Groups, contests, and a photography blog provide community activities, while daily curation and Creative Commons images support discovery. Privacy settings let users choose default visibility and control who can view, download, or interact with individual photos and videos. The mobile app can upload camera-roll photos and videos automatically, keeping them private until the user chooses to share them. Image recognition can find visually similar images and assist with search and organization. Users may authorize third-party apps to work with their accounts and later revoke access in settings. Flickr offers an API for non-commercial use; commercial use requires prior arrangement. The free plan permits 1,000 public photo and video uploads and displays ads. Flickr Pro costs $8 a month, billed annually, and includes unlimited full-resolution sharing and backup, ad-free browsing, detailed statistics, and enhanced privacy settings.

Noodle Gallery is a self-hosted photo and video app for storing and organizing media on a server you provide. Its Shared Spaces let several people contribute to one chronological timeline while keeping their personal libraries separate. A Cmd/Ctrl+K palette searches photos, people, places, tags, albums, Spaces, commands, and settings. The server supports S3-compatible storage, including AWS S3, MinIO, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, and Wasabi. A browser import wizard reads Google Takeout archives while retaining dates, GPS coordinates, descriptions, favorites, and album structure. Native iOS and Android apps include background camera backup, CLIP search, a map, and Shared Spaces. The developers say media, metadata, face-recognition data, and accounts stay on the user’s server, which they cannot access. Noodle Gallery is open source under AGPL-3.0, and each instance provides REST API documentation and Swagger UI at /doc. The free self-hosted plan has no subscription or storage cap, but runs on user-provided hardware.