Now that the query performance issue has been fixed, we might not need to fetch a batch of popular images on the back end anymore. Fetching this batch in one way and all other batches in another way has caused some regressions and duplicate code, so we'd prefer to remove the initial batch if possible and just fetch everything on the front end.
This will have the positive side effect of showing categories for the first batch on the popular tab, which isn't happening now.