Depends on what industry you are in, how the site is structured, how the images are presented and how much textual content you have.

It also depends on what you mean by "promote further". Do you just want to monetise the image traffic or get some organic rankings?

I'm too suffering from this issue..my site has a bunch of images with little content. I've created "ALt" tags for each of these but without results. As for me, I want organic rankings only.

I know that uploading images on popular Photo-sharing sites have a bearing on image search. But how do I optimize the site's inner pages having these images?

Antara, write content. Good, well written content that people will find valuable. Do not copy and paste from elsewhere- it will just be ignored by the search engines, and might land you with a filter penalty or a depressed 'trust' rating.

You cannot rank in SERPs for proper search terms without text content.

Once you have that, you need inbound links. You can ask questions or get ideas in the Link Development Forum [webmasterworld.com], or have a look at past gems in in the Link forum's Library [webmasterworld.com]