I'm in the planning stages of a social website and am having to plan how I want to store the images. I want the images to be classified using several taxonomies (type, location etc), have comments enable, and that they be readily accessible (i.e. re-used) in other parts of the site. This would indicate that images as nodes would meet my requirements, but I don't see how images as nodes differ from a CCK image content type that uses Imagefield (assuming only 1 image is allowed in Imagefield). While doing some searching on this subject, I found this useful link: http://drupal.org/node/325688
From the article:
"Generally, people associate Image module with this images-as-nodes paradigm, and in fact Image requires that all of the images it handles are each represented by a unique node. However, it is possible to take full advantage of all the above benefits with any image-handling module. For example, using Imagefield, you could create a custom content type that contains one CCK imagefield, and configure that field to "contain" (refer to) only a single file. However, note that this custom CCK node type would not be compatible with Image module or its add-ons, and should be named something other than "Image" to avoid confusion."