People don't think it's obvious. They do it here all the time. They credit the source and think that gives them the right to use any image they want.

As for the court cases on the CC images, I was alerted to it a week or so ago - the Unsplash one from a couple of years ago.

I did a search to see how common this problem was, because it bothered me. The stories I shared are some of the stories that came up on the first page of Google. I doubt the problem has gone away.

Alamy have just put a new legal team in place to follow up copyright breaches. I think there's more litigation around, not less.

I'm uncertain how much I should be worried about the CC images, but have decided to replace my own.

You can ignore it if you wish. I suspect the risk with CC images is low.