It would be interesting to do some research at some point to see if Commons may benefit from having the default number of search results changed. See below.

In T71774#2807261, @Deskana wrote:

In T71774#2806927, @Whatamidoing-WMF wrote:

It's of course irritating that we have plenty of room for a pref that's useless to me but not for a pref that would solve daily problems for me.If everybody truly needs to have the same number of results for performace reasons, then can we get the default number of search results (at least at Commons) raised from the current "totally inadequate" number to something in the vicinty of "kind of maybe enough sometimes"?

That's something that'd require more research. We know for text-based searches on other wikis that there's a dramatic drop-off in engagement after the third result, dropping to almost no engagement with results after the 20th. That work made assumptions that would not hold true for image searching on Commons, so we'd need to redo it; only then could we know whether this would be valuable for most users or not. I'll file a task for that.