Hi,
In this area, there's Portfolio wrapper of News Show Pro used - it's a kind of additional mode of News Show Pro prepared especially for the John theme and unfortunately you can't change other options here, you can only change the settings from Portfolio options tab (row, columns count, popup, thumbnail dimensions).
It's possible to change it, but it's a customization beyond our technical support, guys from tidycustoms.net can do it for you.
Regarding the category filter - could you send me a private message with backend access? Then I'll try to help you with that.