I agree that the shear number of these is overwhelming, but I would more than one way to slice up the images than just what was "best". Personally, I find what I consider "best" is very different than what the majority of people consider best.

And this makes me think about why people are complaining that folksonomies don't help us find worthwhile information. Right now, tags tend toward descriptions of attributes and less so toward descriptions of quality:

In a wholly unscientific comparison, here is a sample of tags from the top 150:

art (22033), beach (21421), green (10574), kids (9437), sunset (15860), zoo (6156)

Looking through the list, I did not find tags that seem to describe the quality of the photo or of the subject. Searching only on tags (not titles or descriptions), i threw a few random quality descriptions in:

cute (3821)
beautiful (942)
pretty (770)
bad (663)
good (605)
boring (210)
interesting (103)
quality (96)
unusual (36)
excellent (16)
dull (13)
uninteresting (1)
uncreative (0)

So not only are people bad at tagging, they seem to be really bad at using quality descriptions in their tags.

Something that might be valuable, is a way for other to add tags to your photos/links/documents. The caveat here is that when we can tag other peoples "property" some will see it as a form of graffiti.

Another alternative is that tags I add to other people's tags are seen only by me and by those in my network. Maybe it could be something as simple as a tag that recommends the resource to people in my network. It could be an additional photostream that could introduce me to people at the fringe or outside my immediate network.