[[:category:Copyright_statuses]] ->[[:category:Free_licenses]] ->[[:category:GNU_licenses]] ->[[:category:GFDL]] ->[[:category:Periodic_table]] ->[[:category:Chemical_elements_by_periodic_table_row]] ->[[:category:Periodic_table_row_1]] ->[[:category:Hydrogen]] ->[[:category:Hydrogen_compounds]] ->[[:category:Water]] ->[[:category:Bodies_of_water]] ->[[:category:Islands]] ->[[:category:Islands_of_Europe]] ->[[:category:Ireland_(island)]] ->[[:category:Ireland]] ->[[:category:Culture_of_Ireland]] ->[[:category:Languages_of_Ireland]] ->[[:category:English_language]] ->[[:category:Literature_of_England]] ->[[:category:Writers_from_England]] ->[[:category:J._K._Rowling]] ->[[:category:Harry_Potter]] ->[[:category:Harry_Potter_Characters]]
I don't think most people realize it... But our category system is terribly broken today. I have provided just a few example which are fairly easy to fix, but everywhere you look in the category system you can find problems like this.
Direct navigation is nice, but it doesn't scale to millions of images. For people to be able to find images on commons they will increasingly depend on search.
What is the problem? If people look for Harry Potter images characters, they don's start from [[:category:Free_licenses]]. They go straigh to [[:category:Harry_Potter]]. 2 levels deep!
Really, our system is far more useful than what Gregory suggests. I know this because every week I transfer tens of images from fi.wikipedia to Commons and I will have to find categories for things whose name I don't know in English (or even in Finnish).
In fact, finding a category is often hardest when the categories aren't specific enough. And when it comes to finding an image, for example, for an article about art nouveau/jugend windows, [[:Category:Windows]] is just useless. We do need categories like [[:Category:Jugend windows in Finland]].