Nice question!
Back in 2007 i found Rubin J. Kaplan’s WPPA version 1.0 to use in my blog https://www.opajaap.nl/
The plugin was about 80 kb php code, no more. Just albums and photos, no slideshow, no lightbox, no exif, iptc, comments, rating… no nothing, even no sub-albums.
A total of less than 10 settings (i remember: cover photo selection, size of display and thumbnail images and only a few more).
Like a number of users according to the support forum, i wanted to have sub-albums and found out how to add fields to db tables, what Kaplan did not got working.
He eventually stopped the support.
Because i had substantial additions (at first the subalbums that require the ‘a_parent’ field in the ‘wppa_albums’ table), i was allowed by the plugin bosses to issue a new plugin based upon an existing one. This had to have a different name, hence the ‘plus’ in ‘wp photo album plus’.
I am still very gratefull to Kaplan for his basic design principles that are still in effect, like having the filesystem structure based on photo ids. I never got the sense of having them collected in subdirs per month of uploading like wp does; it is extremely complex to search in it and undable on systems with 100.000 photos. (If you have that hughe number of photos, switch to tree structure to not overstress the server os that may have a limit on the number of files in a folder).
I do not know anything about Kaplan, just that i still thank him for giving me a perfect ‘seed’ that i was able to develop to what it is now.
I also do not know anything of what had been there probably before Kaplan worked on it.
I hope this answers your question.
