Since we haven’t encountered such a thing before, I wanted to get information from you valued friends; I would be especially happy if @cryptosam answers. We have a site where country photos are used in front of the categories located in the sidebar. They are 16x16 in size, and there are an average of 20 categories on the page. Do you think this poses a spam risk?
If I were in the same situation, I would either arrange something with CSS (Font Awesome, etc.) there, or if the images and categories are fixed, I would sprite the images. If you can’t be bothered, don’t spam it; I think just remove it.