With tight competition in the blogosphere for visitors and their attention, bloggers need to consider not just providing a fresh unique and interesting content, but also provide blog posts design to grab visitors’ attention. One of the elements of this post design enhancement is images. There are multiple reasons to use pictures inside the posts. Among them:

• Visualizing the topic of discussion;
• Grabbing readers’ attention (great for making your RSS feed readers stop and read);
• Drawing people’s eye down a post beyond the first few lines;
• Illustrating examples;
• Giving your blog a more personal touch;
• Engaging the emotions and senses of readers;
• Giving posts more authority.

In most blogging platforms, you can load images directly to your host. However, there are many advantages of posting your images at the special image hosting servers. Among them:

• Image files, stored on third-party sites (many of them offer free services), can be used anywhere you might need them: blogs, social networking sites, message boards, etc. If you load images, for example, on Blogger, you cannot use them on any other location besides BlogSpot domain.
• Storing images on offsite account saves disk space from your blog hosting account.
• Very strong advantage is that it saves your bandwidth from the blog hosting account and uses the third-party bandwidth. So, be sure that you images host allows hot linking; otherwise, it will be useless for you.
• It is easy because you get various codes that can be used on blogs, forums, message boards, and social communities.
• Several images hosting sites even are offering you share of the ads-generated income, so by doing what you need to do for your blog design, you get additional passive income from images, stored on the server, exposure.

For your convenience, I have compiled the list of 25 most popular free image hosting sites on RateItAll with brief description, access links, and rating:

http://www.rateitall.com/t-25965-free-images-hosting-for-bloggers.aspx

Additional Reading:
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/11/13/using-images-to-take-your-posts-to-a-new-level/

http://www.tomrafteryit.net/adding-images-to-your-blog-post/

http://antbag.com/how-to-position-images-in-blog-posts/