I would suggest two databases .. for several reasons:

1) It is best to separate independently operating systems into their own environments. This make maintainability and portability easier.

2) If you ever want to shift “just your gallery” somewhere, you would have it (and associated data) in it’s own database

3) Backup and restore procedures pose less risk as each database can be interrogated independently.

4) Security can be improved, with each database sporting it’s own security settings and passwords.

(does this sound waffly enough yet??)

Apart from it looking good and trying to keep the coding simple, there are very few good reasons to keep everything in a single system (I’m talking of course about small, single-server operations .. which I’m assuming yours is?)

my £0.02 worth ..

Martiankeeper