What happened in my case was the lawyers primarily felt the pictures didn't fall under fair use because the owner of the copyrights contended that the images were being used to attract people to the site and as a result generate income for me.

I don't really understand how you can copyright a photo of a copyright protected physical item (assuming a plaque was copyright protected) as it would seem to me a picture of the item could be used provided it falls under fair use, but if not you don't have a right to use that image in any way...But, I'm no lawyer and it wouldn't be the first legal thing that hurts my brain to understand.