Sharing/linking images from a site, good for SEO?

Everyone knows how important it is that other sites link to your pages. But does the same go for images? I would think so.

Let's say I need to post on a forum and include an image in my post, if I host the image on my website and then use the image URL for the post... what benefits does that have? Does google count this? What if your email marketing includes images from your site and your emails are getting thousands of views. Does that help at all?

Thanks for sharing!

Google does their best to understand the content of an image. While a stock photo isn’t going to carry much weight, an original infographic might.
+ adding appropriate alt tags to the images on your website can help your website achieve better rankings in the search engines by associating keywords with images.