you could probably accomplish the same thing by using flickr's api. let users upload photos to flickr (with a certain tag that your site would look for) or through your site, but collect and present all of them with your own layout and sharing mechanisms. flickr can host all of the photos and let users keep copies of their own photos in their own photostream. you could pull in comments made on flickr and show them in the same stream with comments left on your own site.
there should still be incentive to use your site to view the photos, though, like having a voting mechanism and some kind of 'picture of the day' that would get displayed on the homepage.