Question: What are the experiences in building a photo oriented site in EE?

There are some really nice plugins out there, like Channel Images or Assets, but they are all oriented around "uploading as you go" and not for serving images from some kind of back-end (like slideshowpro director or similar).
For myself and fellow photographers the input would be extremly useful around how others might have solved this.

Answer: 
We typically just use either Channel Images, Assets, or in the past a Matrix field with File fields inside of it, coupled with one of the jQuery plugins that works based on a set of markup. You then read the selected module's data for the current entry out, and insert a bunch of `<li>`s in a `<ul>` or `<div>`s or whatever the given jQuery plugin expects, then style as needed.

I don't feel that there is really a one size fits all approach for this kind of thing, you need to find a jQuery plugin that has the behavior that you want, then work to couple it with your chosen backend module that stores the imagedata.
All ended up with me using a totally separate application for images, Koken, with added styling similar to the main site.