A friend just mentioned Aspect to me and it looks like a really interesting project - it’s actually very close to something I was scoping out myself, which is great because it would mean I don’t have to build it
My main use-case would be to store the majority of the library on my NAS and only the past month or two of full-res photos on my computers. I’ve been poking about and it looks like some sort of headless Linux server is planned, which would be exactly what I’d be looking for! I have an awful backlog of high-res wildlife photos that I never get around to culling out of laziness, so I just shove it all off to the NAS currently.
I don’t think I’ve seen a beta release of it knocking about, but when there is such a thing I’d be very interested in testing it out. I’m a software engineer myself so I can at least provide useful feedback, and if it’s open source, as I think I saw mentioned, I could potentially help out (my background is in Ruby but I can work in most things). It might make sense to have it set up with Docker, as that’s likely the easiest way of letting people run it on Synology devices.
I think one post mentioned a web interface for monitoring the server, which sounds like a nice idea. Depending on the language it might not be too difficult to include something like a Prometheus exporter too, to allow monitoring in Grafana (though if that doesn’t exist and there’s an API I’ll just make that myself later )
Basically; when there’s a beta copy of the server ready to try, gimme a shout - I’ll be ready to do some testing