Category page improvements on Commons - wall-of-images, scrolling to see subcat files (Community Wishlist/W478)

Description

Update category pages on Commons to display images in a wall-of-images format (similar to MediaSearch results) rather than the standard category page format

See c:Commons:Requests for comment/Technical needs survey/Wall of images view for category pages including images in subcats and Talk:Community Wishlist/W397#Clarification.

Possible technical solution:

use MediaSeach to replace the category page with an incategory search – though we will still need to show text links to subcategories somewhere too, and not only the images
- note that incategory searches don't currently have detailed scoring for ordering of results, so this might need work – ordering by incoming links makes sense, though right now incoming_links in the search index is the number of local wiki links and for Commons images it'd probably be better to order by non-local incoming links
as the user scrolls use the search API to fetch subcategories, and then do incategory searches on those, thus allowing users to drill down the category tree
not sure how we'd tell which categories contain only images - if there's no feasible way of doing this it might block this wish

Assigned focus area

Unassigned

Type of wish

System change

Tags

Categories, Multimedia and Commons

Affected users

People searching/browsing images on Commons

Other details

Created: 15:42, 4 December 2025
Last updated: 16:20, 23 March 2026
Author: CParle (WMF) (talk)

Voting

This wish currently has 5 supporters. Voting for this wish is open until it is completed.

Supporters of this wish

Support Strong support - this is by far the biggest issue with the hierarchical categories on the Commons. If I want to find, say, a nice picture of a bird to illustrate a Wikipedia article, I have to click and scroll through dozens upon dozens of individual subcategories (bird X in country Y in year Z, etc.) to actually see all the images. This is my biggest issue with hierarchical categories and the existing rules against overcategorization - it makes discoverability horrifically bad. Being able to see the contents of all subcategories when scrolling through images in a category would completely fix this issue. 4300streetcar (talk) 21:17, 5 December 2025

Support As long as it remains possible to also filter out subcategories (or select which ones to include), this sounds like something that would greatly improve the experience of browsing files on Commons. Waldyrious (talk) 19:59, 12 December 2025

Support one of the better ideas that has been suggested recently ! TheDJ (talk) 18:48, 20 December 2025

Support Suggestion. On any category page, create an option to be able to show all file images of all the sub-categories, and all the sub-sub-categories, etc. Allow this option in at least two ways: 1. Allow through an option with the User preferences menu, 2. Allow through a button or select switch on any category page that would display all file images of all subcategories, sub-sub-categories, etc. for that specific category (conversely also, allow to "de-select" that option on the category pages). The displayed file images could be: 1. In the same order (top to bottom) as the existing category- subicategories tree, or 2. Allow far re-sorting by date, name, source, etc. Ooligan (talk) 01:12, 31 December 2025

Support This, with a good scoring system. Finding good images on Commons is unnecessarily hard and Google does a better job finding something decent. Check the ViewIt gadget too. Ponor (talk) 18:27, 7 February 2026