About two-thirds of the population are visual learners, who like to see what they are learning. That’s a pretty good reason to use photos in your blog posts, but when time’s at a premium, you may find that it’s too much bother to download an appropriate image to your hard drive, resize it to will fit well into your post, upload it to your blog, and finally delete it from your hard drive.

I’m always on the lookout for tools to make my life and my job easier, so I was really impressed when Lynette Chandler, the brain behind Blog Energizer, told me about the Grab & Save plugin for WordPress, which basically streamlines four steps into one. Watch her video to see how it works:

Pretty good stuff, eh?

There are probably times when you want something very specific, and you just might not be able to find it in the public domain. In those situations, it might be worth buying royalty-free stock photos from a site like iStockPhoto or Crestock, but you won’t be able to use Grab & Save. Fortunately, there’s another plugin just for cases like this.

After you install the Microstock plugin, you enter the details of your iStockPhoto and/or Fotalia account. When you create a post, you’ll see a new field where you enter your search terms for a photo to go with your post. These will probably be the same as the tags and/or keywords for that post. Immediately you’ll be presented with thumbnails of images to choose from. When you see one you like, click on it for a larger view and to see how many credits it will cost you. Click on the download button to add the image to your post and the credits will be deducted from your account. You’ll have the option of automatically adding a copyright notice below the image, and if you’re also an affiliate, you can have your affiliate link inserted as well.

With great tools like this available, there’s no longer an excuse for not putting images in your posts!