First step you should do is to adopt a few on-page optimization techniques to make your site more search engine friendly and which are crucial for SERP ranking. On-page Optimization: • Keyword Research & Competition Analysis • Meta Tag Placement (Title, Keywords, Description and others) • Image Optimization (Alt Tags) • Web Page Optimization (Pages titled with relevant keywords) • Robots.txt • XML Sitemap • Search Engine Verification and Sitemap Submission and domain name is also very important, here a few tips for choosing the right domain name http://bit.ly/Pxl0
It all depends on what your plan is for the site. If you are building the site to make money by optimizing for Google search then the first thing you need to do is some keyword research. I would always choose my domain name based on this research as it makes it alot easier to optimise a site's homepage quickly if your keyword is in the URL.
-- Fill up your website with unique article and prominent keywords. Keywords should be those on which you want your site on the top. These keywords should be properly embedded in the content. -- Search engine read the text not the picture. But you have to make you understand what is in these pics. So, fill the caption properly according to the picture and also give alt and title tag to the picture so that search engine can easily understand those pics.
Do you only want to start a photo website without content? If yes, the only way is to find related keywords for your pictures and make backlinks for those keywords. But if you want to insert content on your website too, use above answers by other members.