Thank you, Olivier, for the tip. This site may end up being maintained by someone else so I'm trying to avoid Position overrides. I'd be OK with creating a new variation but am not sure how that would help me in this case.
If I can't figure out anything else, I'll probably end up with position override but was hoping there are some creative folks who could suggest a thing or two with e.g. the HTML Typo as you mentioned.
Another option, of course, is to create a separate field for the image caption/title but I was trying to keep things simple and avoid GroupX + FieldX (as there's a need for multiple images), especially because the title is already a standard part of the IMG tag.
Anyone has any other ideas re how one could easily pull the title attribute from the image and render it?