We are in the process of creating a Photo Community using Buddypress. Our current photo community runs on a Ning Platform and offers a lot of features out of the box like the admin can showcase, or feature Top Photos etc. You can view the Ning website at http://http://photocritic.digitalphotographycourses.co.za/. Unfortunately, with Ning's decline and lack of development, we decided to move to another platform.
To my regret, I've chosen Buddypress and bought rtMedia Pro because of the feature set. However, after many weeks, I realised that Buddypress and rtMedia is not yet versatile enough for an interactive Media-Community Site where administrators have control to feature images, tag photos for competitions, display photos according to ratings etc.
In 2014, there was an indication that rtMedia will work on it. Rahul mentioned that incorporating admin-only attributes may be the solution and that it might become available in May 2015 - http://community.rtcamp.com/t/create-a-featured-media-page-by-admin-choose/2255
I would like to know, if you are aware of when a solution might become available and if any interactive photo communities found a work around?