It's not like you're a black hat hacker scraping content from peoples' sites to rake in the traffic. I think it's fair use. I think the person who asked you to remove their work has a right to ask for that, and if you're not a jerk then of course you'll oblige. But I think said photographer is chasing down a problem that doesn't exist — It isn't like the people on this site are going to pay him or her to do photographic work for them, I doubt the majority of the users of this site would hire a photographer. In the event that a few would, your site is contributing to her exposure as a side effect of people being able to say, "I like this," about it.
In this context, I don't think it's much different from the idea of a hyperlink, to be honest. I think indexing a smaller copy of the image for identification is fair game, and a text link for an image wouldn't be useful at all.
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In this context, I don't think it's much different from the idea of a hyperlink, to be honest. I think indexing a smaller copy of the image for identification is fair game, and a text link for an image wouldn't be useful at all.
That's my two cents.