A picture, they say, speaks a thousand words- and although I do want to stress the importance of written content on your blog (especially for search engine optimization purposes), adding images to your blog posts is always a good idea. Here are some tools to help you do that, and do it well:
Freebie Images by Crestock
From one of the best stock photography sites out there comes this WordPress plug-in aptly named “Freebie Images”. Basically, what it does is allow you to use any of the free stock photos in their library. Once you’ve installed the plug-in, simply search their library from within WordPress, and if you see something you like, simply drag and drop it into your blog post. You can also search according to image orientation (portrait or landscape)and filetype. Because Crestock has such professional, high-quality images, this one’s my favorite.
Photodropper Plug-In
Photo Dropper works almost the same way, but it searches Creative Commons-licensed photos in Flickr. You also have the option to only search for photos that can be used commercially, which is important when you’re running a commercial or business blog.
PicApp
PicApp also makes it easy to find high-quality photos and use them legally. What I like about PicApp is how easy it is to search for either “Creative” or “Editorial” images, depending on whether your blog post is a news item or a feature. Once you select a photo you like, PicApp gives you a snippet of code to use in your post- and voila! To show you how quick this is, I just did a search for “Business”, and got this picture on my first page of results:
Faster Image Insert Plug-In
Finally, if you want to use your own photos but aren’t too happy about how slowly WordPress inserts your images, check out this plug-in, which works simply but can make a world of difference if you use a lot of photos. It gives you full control of the built-in Media Manager, and allows you to insert multiple images, or edit mass info in one-shot.
