I used to do this some two years back . I had this site where I had a good number of images by category. once you enter the category you will see small thumbnail and you will have to click those thumbnails to go to the full image. I used to attach pop-under adds with these thumbnail and there used to be text link adds just below the thumbnail. I also used to place a back, main, next button at the bottom and put text link adds above and below.
Basically I used to focus on accidental clicking more then them clicking on something they like. It used to work like a charm.
for traffic I used to watermark some of the good images and upload them to various image hosting sites. and post some of the good once to image shareing and xboards. back then there were not much but nower days there are a lot of them. just google it and you will find a lot of them .