Blogging pictures

No matter how good your content, adding an appropriate picture to your blog post attracts the eye and draws your visitors in. However, unless you are a remarkably good photographer or illustrator, you will be struggling to have all the pictures you need at hand. I have been known to go searching for images using google images in the past, but there is a drawback in just picking images off the web. For most bloggers, there is no real problem with locating images this way, but finding an image on the web does not automatically give you the right to use the image in your own blog. Images are legally protected by copyright laws and you may need permission to display them.
'Fair use' rules dictate that if you are writing a post for example, about Microsoft Windows, you should be able to use their logo as long as you are not claiming any special link to Microsoft which does not legally exist. If however, you are just writing a general post and you want to include an image that you have not created yourself, then you may need to consider using a service that provides royalty-free pictures to ensure that you are not crossing any legal boundaries.
There are a number of these services available and I may well provide some links to others as I find them, but I tried this one: 'Dreamstime' yesterday for the first time and found an image for a blog post - the image itself was hosted by 'stockvault' and was OK to download even without registering although registering is encouraged, and if I use the site again I certainly will take the time to register properly.
Personally I always like to try and 'customise' pictures to fit into the style of a blog - usually this is just a case of cropping and colorising an image to fit with the colour scheme. If you have a decent graphics package you may also be able to overlay images and crop out backgrounds etc..