I am a consultant with a potential client who is unhappy with Extensis Portfolio. They are a small photo studio who is looking for a product to possibly replace Portfolio in a more traditional server and client based model on premises, with a centralized archive storage device. Would Aspect Pro work?
Thank you.
Howard Goldstein
(917) 842-5754
hrgoldstein@gmail.com
Based on our current functionality, the general setup should definitely work. We plan to release a server version with a simple web frontend, too, which would enable setting up a central headless server, whereas today it will still require a desktop environment.
I don’t really know how Extensis Portfolio compares here, but one thing to be aware of is that we do not currently have any form of permission or sharing system, meaning that any user who has been granted access to a library can make arbitrary changes. For a small photo studio that is probably acceptable, but will become a problem with a larger user count. We plan to extend this appropriately, but that is something that will not happen before the beta phase is concluded.
Having said that, starting after the next release we will concentrate on getting the synchronization system rock solid. As it stands, although it generally works well, it should still be regarded as beta quality and may still show issues in scenarios where multiple users perform changes at the same time. For that reason, I would not recommend to rely on it in a production environment just yet. A rough estimation for a release quality implementation is around June this year.
Thank you very much for the information. Can you share any sense of the requirements for the headless server, and for rough pricing? When and if you think it might be appropriate I would be very interested in participating in any beta testing of the system. I have been running the single user version for a while.
I will continue to monitor the community threads.
Howard Goldstein
The server version itself is expected to be free and we aim to release it as open-source eventually. It will support synchronization with both, free and the pro versions of Aspect.
The server hardware requirements will depend on the mode of operation and on the total amount of images. Baseline requirements revolve mainly around the amount of RAM. 4 GB are recommended for up to around 750,000 images. We also plan to enable performing heavy computations, such as image analysis or batch exports, on the server, too — in that case more memory may be required, as well as a functioning GPU setup, but this will always stay optional and is not yet fully worked out.
Operating system support will be Linux, Window, macOS and binaries for x86-64 and arm64 will be available.
There will be a blog announcement once we release the first version for testing and I will also try to keep in mind sending you a quick notice!
I am interested in sharing some, or all, of my photos with family members who will be outside of my local LAN. Is this something you foresee the server edition being capable of? I would want something that is controllable and secure, but not too complex. No manually set up double reverse, NAT, proxxie, onion, VPN, bla, bla, bla, though. Figuring that stuff out always makes my head hurt.
Cheers,
Gord
We plan to add a manual server mode where you can define a fixed port that you’d explicitly open via NAT on your router. For this mode, a dynamic DNS service is also required in order to register the server via a fixed name on the clients. This is planned to be available together with the server version.
A more powerful mode with less manual setup is also planned, but will require considerably more work - replacing TCP with the QUIC protocol, implementing STUN to enable bidirectional connections with NAT on both sides, and some kind of replacement for DNS to enable finding devices. I definitely don’t expect this to land this year and this will be conceptually be tied to a proper multi-user system, where you can share parts of a library with other people, including giving specific rights to read/add/modify contents.