'In the beginning Bharat ~[the developer]~ bought a digital camera and thought "*wouldn't it be nice* if I could put these photos somewhere." But when Gallery 1.x came into being, the developers had no idea what they were doing. They *didn't know PHP very well*, didn't understand the importance of separating code from content, didn't have a whole lot of database experience, you get the idea. So they started by *just writing something that worked*, and then slowly building upon it. The end result is Gallery 1.x which *works quite nicely* but internally is *a bit of a mess*.' http://codex.gallery2.org/History