According to Wikipedia, the popular adage “An image is worth a thousand words” refers to the idea that complex stories can be described with just a single still image, or that an image may be more influential than a substantial amount of text. This is true, and as a blogger you have to work a lot with images. This is why it is important to have tools that can really make your blogging life easier.
In this article, I have compiled 10 excellent WordPress plugins to work with images.

Hot Linked Image Cacher

As I said in my previous post about content thieves, people using images from your server on their own site can be a nuisance.
The Hot Linked Image Cacher plugin can detect when your images are using elsewhere than on your blog and forbid them from displaying, in order to help you save your precious bandwidth.
Get it: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/hot-linked-image-cacher/

NextGEN Gallery

How can I write a post about using images in WordPress without saying a word about one of the most popular plugin ever? NextGEN Gallery is a full gallery management system which integrates in your blog. It allows you to create galleries, slideshows and more. A must have for photographers!
Get it: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery/

WP Smush it

Smush.it is a webservice which allow you to dramitically decrease your images size, without losing any quality. However, smush.it is not very user-friendly; your images have to be on a server (you can’t upload them directly) and you can’t “smush” more than 5 images at a time.
WP Smush.it integrates the power of the smush.it webservice into your WordPress blog. Just upload your images using WP built-in form, “smush” them, and enjoy your saved bandwidth. How cool is that?
Get it: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smushit/

Watermark Reloaded

On small nich blogs, (such as my blog in French Visiter New York) I have noticied that many visitors are coming from Google images, and I can guess that many of them are saving some of the pictures they’ve found on their hard drive.

Another thing to consider is images theft: In fact, it is extremely common that people search Google images and then re-use the pics they found on their own website, without giving credit to the original author.

The Watermark plugin is good for both of the above case: It will automatically add a watermark on uploaded images. You can choose the text to display, its color, its size and its position.
Get it: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/watermark-reloaded/

Timthumb

Well, TimThumb is not a plugin but a script. Its aim is pretty simple: It can resize any images from your server “on the fly”, which is extremely useful and will make you save a lot of time.

Using TimThumb is easy: Click here to get the code, paste it on a file and save it as timthumb.php, under your wp-content directory.
Once done, you simply have to call the script like this:

<img src="/scripts/timthumb.php?src=/images/whatever.jpg&h=150&w=150&zc=1" alt="" />

In other words, you just have to call the timthumb.php file and pass your image as a parameter. same goes for desired width or height.
Get it: http://timthumb.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/timthumb.php

Max Image Size Control

Have you ever seen a blog where a displayed image were too large and destroyed the layout? I have seen many, and honestly, this looks extremely amateurish.
To avoid this, give the Max Image Size Control plugin a try. It allows you to set a maximum size for images, and even better, you can have various sizes depending on categories.
Get it: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/max-image-size-control/

jQuery Image Lazy Load WP

It is well known that images can take a while to load on websites. As many bloggers are displaying lists of images (for example, “lists” posts illustrated, or posts such as “X beautiful blog footers”) the visitor often has to wait bfore being able to read the post.
“Lazy loading” is a process that only load an image if requested, which is great for blogger who often display a huge number of images per post.
The jQuery Image Lazy Load WP plugin will do a great “Lazy loading” job, using the power of jQuery.
Get it: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jquery-image-lazy-loading/

Shutter Reloaded

When displaying images, the “Lightbox” functionality is very popular. Consequently, many different “Lightbox like” plugins are available on the WordPress plugin repository. But which one is the best?
My favorite is definitely Shutter Reloaded; it is highly customizable and it requires no additional javascript libraries.
Get it: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/shutter-reloaded/

WordPress Media Flickr

If you’re a photographer or just someone who use lots of images, there’s no doubt that you have a flickr account. This popular service, which allow people to share pictures, is in fact extremely popular.
The WordPress Media Flickr plugin allow you to easily use your flickr pictures in your WordPress blog posts.
Get it: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-media-flickr/

Faster Image Insert

Have you ever noticed that uploading images in WordPress could have been easier? In fact, you have to click on a button, wait for the thickbox to load, and finally upload your picture.
The Faster Image Insert plugin purpose is to move WordPress Media Manager down in a meta-box, right next to main editing panel, in order to make image uploading/editing easier and faster.
Get it: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/faster-image-insert/

Any other WordPress plugins you find very useful for working with images? Don’t hesitate to let me know in a comment!