A lot of bloggers recommend adding pictures to the top of every post. While that’s all well and good (and I promise I’ll be doing the same at some point), finding the right picture can be a huge waste of time. You’ve already spent the last ten minutes to an hour writing your post–now you need to take a few more minutes to find a picture, scale it to the right size, upload it to your image gallery, and then add it to the post. Talk about tedious. Yawn.

But it doesn’t have to be this way, thanks to a number of great sites to help you search through the millions of photos at Flickr (and other photo hosts) for one special shot that can make your great post into something truly memorable. Here are the six best tools to aid your image search.

1. Picitup. Picitup is an image searching machine that blows away other web focused searches like Google Images. You start by typing in a keyword that you’re looking for. Hit search and you’ve got hundreds of images at your fingertips.

But a bulky load of images is nothing if you can’t narrow the results down. A good place for bloggers like you and me to start is to switch the settings over to Flickr and select Creative Commons in the process. This gives you access to a ton of high quality (and not so high quality) images that are free to use so long as you attribute the original author.

Creative Commons sorting is not the only way to filter pictures on Picitup, however. You can even break your search results down by color, size, orientation, type of picture (person, advertisement, etc.), and even object shape. The shape search has some issues, but the rest of the settings work really well.

2. Compfight. Thanks to coverage by a number of big name sites, Compfight has generated a ton of buzz about it being the “best” Flickr search app. While it doesn’t have nearly as large of a scope as Picitup does, Compfight more than makes up for it with a friendly and easily accessible user interface.

Unlike so many image searches that don’t show a lot of pictures per page, Compfight breaks free by displaying loads of pictures at once. All it takes is a quick scroll through the first couple of pages to find just the picture you need.

Of course, as with all of the Flickr search apps, Compfight allows you to sort your results by Creative Commons licensing, as well as whether or not you can get the original straight from Flickr. Search can also be done through tags or all text, whichever floats your boat.

3. FlickrStorm. On first glance, FlickrStorm doesn’t look like much (especially in Safari). You type in a keyword and you’re given an assortment of images straight from Flickr with whatever type of licensing you need for your project. And it seems like that’s all this app does.

Then you click on a picture.

Boom, the image pops up right on the side of your search so you never have to leave the page. And it appears in your history to the left so you can compare shots as you go.

Perhaps the handiest feature on FlickrStorm, though, is the tray. Shift-Click on a thumbnail of your choice and that picture is added to the tray. When you’ve had enough photo searching for the day, just click on the save icon and you’re given a website with all of the pictures from your tray displayed in whatever size you want. Link to it, save it, download the pictures in bulk. Whatever you want to do.

4. PictureSandbox. Don’t let the amateurish design fool you. PictureSandbox is a hell of an image search with capabilities that span from Flickr to Webshots to Fotolia and more. Its a great tool if you’re looking for stock photos too–but there are better search apps out there for Flickr alone.

After a search, images are displayed in a similar fashion to Compfight, but not nearly as many per page. You can then click on the images to display a larger thumbnail and show some of the photo’s specs. Unfortunately, there’s no way to sort the images by license, size or anything else.

5. Creative Commons. Then there’s the tried and true Creative Commons site. They have a pretty handy Flickr search engine built into their web page that takes you directly to the Flickr site itself. Searching this way yields plenty of results, but it can take a while for you to find exactly what picture you want thanks to the limited amount of pictures per page. Also, every search from the Creative Commons site ensures that you get a picture with CC licensing, obviously.

6. Flickr. The last great way to search Flickr is to use Flickr’s built in search itself. You don’t get the hundreds of photos at your fingertips like you do with some of the earlier tools, but there are more than enough search options to please even the most diligent image searcher. Sort by camera, content type, licensing and more.

So which app do you use to search for post pictures? Did I forget to add your favorite to the list? Let me know in the comments.