They aren't "galleries" -- they are small thumbnails which are a product of being able to sort the images.
Whatever you want to call it it's a collection of 200 copyrighted images on a webpage. They're only slightly smaller than the size we use for them in the articles.
I added a modified fair use template to the top of the category page which explains the copyrighted status of all of the images. We could play with something like this -- a big notice which says that this is a category of thumbnails for images which are used in Wikipedia articles etc. etc. Anyway it is an idea.
At least that's something. Here's a part of the text:
"The use of a small number of low-resolution Pokémon images to illustrate articles about the subjects of the images in question ... is believed to fall under the fair use clause ... Any other uses of these images, on Wikipedia or elsewhere, may be copyright infringement."
This works for the articles but the category page itself does not have a small number of images, it has 200 images. And the images there are not illustrating articles, they're just there, without any commentary. I just don't see how this can be fair use under our usual rationales. If it was a maintenance page inaccessible to the public then that would be one thing but it's actually a perfectly accessible page which you can even find with a Google search.
I think that in practice the courts would be very sympathetic to Wikipedian claims of fair use and maybe we could even sell them some Chewbacca defence like "well, the page doesn't really exist until the user clicks on it because it's dynamically generated" but we're generally trying to play it as safe as possible and I don't see this fitting in with that.
If we are going to have fair use images (which it seems we are), we can't not have categories for them, because it would make identifying, sorting, keeping track of, etc. impossible, which would create an even worse legal problem (not being at all aware of what we have, how many we have, being able to monitor them) than having the category thumbnails would, in my opinion.
I agree, removing the category is definitely not the way to go. Nor do I want to delete all fair use images or anything like that. What I'd like is a technical option which allows us to turn off auto-display of thumbnails for selected categories.
Regards, Haukur