I'm reminded of my time working at [0]StudentRND. We had a [1]CodeDay coming up and we wanted to promote the event to people we know using Facebook. We submitted a couple of different text based update reminders and mini-promotions for the event and watched as they largely didn't get a lot of attention.
However, while my friend [2]Adam was laser cutting some of the event-giveaways he casually uploaded a picture of the process to Facebook with the caption "Making some CodeDay giveaways."
In surprise we watched as that photo got 4-8x the exposure and response from people compared to the previous text-based posts. While watching this, I thoughtlessly stated "Wow, we should be posting more photos to engage people." Upon saying this, everyone in the room froze at the abrupt realization that we should have been posting more photos right then and there. At the passing of that most tense of pauses, each person in the room started scrambling in search of an interesting photo to post about CodeDay.
So yes, photos are important for people. They communicate more info, and they communicate it faster than text.
[0] -- http://studentrnd.org/
[1] -- http://codeday.org/
[2] -- http://adamryman.com/
My criticism is not "Text vs. Photo" but rather how to design for "Text AND Photo". The problem with the current design is 1) if there is photo, it's really hard to notice the text; 2) if there is no photo, the text reading experience is suboptimal too.
IMHO, a good design is the one where different elements can co-exist in harmony instead of try to shout louder than the others. It is from this perspective that the new Google+ design failed.