No Fancy Image Captions in WordPress 2.6?

I’m still learning the ins and outs of WordPress 2.6. What’s making me go hair-pulling crazy today is trying to do an image placement in one of my blog posts. See, WP has this “Add Media” function where you can select to “add an image.” It even lets you insert a caption and specify the padding around the image, among other fancy functions. Cool, right?

But it’s not quite enough. I want to use lots of Flickr.com images while still honoring the requirements of the Creative Commons license (and my own sense of style). Ideally, the images I place in my posts would have these elements, in this order:

• Image
• Caption underneath, WITH a little “cc” icon (for Creative Commons) AND a live link to the photographer’s page on Flickr.com
• And the text of the post would wrap around that, either on the left or the right

WP’s “add an image” function won’t let me do that. It consistently strips out the “cc” icon and the link. (See an example here.) Sometimes the placement is wonky and not aligned right or left like I selected, too.

I know I could put the photo attribution — styled as I want it – at the bottom of my post. But that’s not the placement I want, darn it.

Then I had the (brilliant for me) idea of using a table. I’d put the image in the top and the caption on bottom. It works fine … except for the fact that WP throws in all sorts of other coding automatically and for some reason the table ends up with a huge space above it. (See an example here.)

I guess I’ll be searching online tonight for some answers, but there haven’t been any so far.

I’ve been reading HTML tables tutorials online without much success so far. There may be a way to do this in CSS too, but I’m guessing that would be even harder. If you can help with a table (or other) coding suggestion — please do. Thanks!