Is it possible to do well in both at the same time? When I had good rankings at google, I was surprised I didn't get any referrers from google images. Now referrers from Google Images is all I get. D'oh. This has happened to me twice, actually. I was only ranking at google images when my site got penalized for duplicate content (from an old site I hadn't deleted) and now I am only ranking for images too. I don't know what's wrong this time. So, anybody care to share their experiences with Google Images?
Google images does well for me, about 1:1 I do have some weird rankings like a search on images for Charlotte Church affords me quite a few hits but I am nowhere on a regular search. But I am pretty high up on both for Abi Titmuss. Oddly enough my blog is hardly about those two, but I am grateful for the hits.
I have a photo related site that is still in the sandbox, but not for their image results. It receives 4 times the amount of traffic from the regular serps... Also depends on the type of site you have... if it's a picture site then you should receive some traffic (If optomized)
If you have good rankings and good on site design you should rank well for images. Name your images keyword.jpg link them to keyword.html, use keyword as your alt and have your keywords on page in the usual places. This should help both your organic serps and image serps