Elements has pretty much everything you'll use to manipulate images for a blog, without the steep learning curve that GIMP or Photoshop takes.
However ---
If all you're looking for is a program to crop, resize, alter basic image elements (brightness/contrast, saturation, color adjustments), flip an image or rotate it in small increments, convert an image to grayscale, capture an image from your screen, set an image as wallpaper, create a slideshow which can be used as a screen saver or self-extracting program, make a panorama, paint, erase and clone images, play a wide variety of video formats and such, I suggest you download the free program Irfanview (
http://www.irfanview.com) and its associated filter package. It's got a shitload of other useful features, including creating contact sheets, then turning those contact sheets into thumbnail pages in html, where all you do is click on the thumbnail to get the larger image, also in html. You can also select a group of images and turn them into an html slideshow (different than above) also formatted to be posted on the web. You can add text over an image, or do a batch rename or resize or both at the same time.
Plus there's a lot of spiffy plug-in effects.
Did I mention it's free? And it's unbelievably easy to learn and use, and has a great Help function to take you step-by-step through a process. I've been using it for 10 years on a daily basis.
There's also a version of Irfanview you can carry around on your thumb drive.
http://tinyurl.com/2relac GIMP is also available as a portable app:
http://tinyurl.com/ms6ymThere's an effort to create a Photoshop-like interface for GIMP to make it more familiar to people like me. It was only available for Linux, but now there's an Apple and Windows version.
http://tinyurl.com/cqg3hoBTW, if you are going to post photos on the web, be sure to get Microsoft's Powertoys Image Resizer.
http://tinyurl.com/553fw6 My sister used to send me 3MB picture files, which shut down my email program. Once set up (easy), Image Resizer will be found in your context menu -- just right-click on the image file you want to resize, choose the size (I always choose Large, which produces a screen-size image without any noticeable loss of quality) and voila, you get a copy of the original image which has been resized from 3MB to 125k.
Hope this helps.