Personally I'm not bothered how many hits any of my photographs get, I don't post just to generate hits.
However I do share my photographs with other sites, and Facebook forums, but I always upload separately, so that there is no link to this site.
The comments are more useful to me, as they often contain additional information from other members, or corrections. It's obvious though, that if a photograph gets a comment, it them gets a much larger number of hits that it would otherwise, even if the comment is something mundane like correcting an IMO number.
So it seems to me that a photograph will get more hits through getting a comment, than it would if it gets shared.