I need to take a nap: I don't think we are communicating.
:-(
Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh):

After all... tomorrow is another day.

my apologies.

for macs the key shortcut is "command F" so maybe you'd use "right-click F" or "control F?" I have only ever used macs.

Using that good old "find" function that comes with browsers saves tons of eye squinting. It took me a while to realize that it works so well!

Happy Chanukah!

I prefer my photos on the left (not in the centre), but still want my text to follow immediately after the photo, not several lines down.

If you don't want text next to a left aligned image, then you must choose the option "alignnone."

You want to delete all of that to get rid of the extra line breaks.

Are you copying and pasting from somewhere outside of the wordpress.com platform?

<p><a href="http://diaryofahouseelf.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/i-think-im-right-all-the-time-sarah-now-could-someone-please-make-this-all-pretty-so-i-can-pin-it/29273466299242968_eqpnghkp_c/#main" rel="attachment wp-att-719"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-719" alt="29273466299242968_EQpnghkP_c" src="http://diaryofahouseelf.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/29273466299242968_eqpnghkp_c.jpg?w=610"   /></a></p>
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Go to the text editor, and use your browser's "find" function (command-f on a mac, probably something similar on other operating systems) to search for 719 or search for attachment wp-att-719 so you can find the code.

Get rid of, delete, all of the code like this:
<p> </p>

The alignment icons in the WordPress editor are for aligning text; they are not for aligning images. http://en.support.wordpress.com/visual-editor/#alignment They are used to achieve wrapping text around images on either the right or left hand side, or to display an image that's centered without text on either side of it. If the text beside the images does not occupy the same amount of space that the image beside it does then the text wrapping will continue and the images and text that follow will have a staggered appearance.

Align-left means position left, with the rest of the content wrapping around the right side of the image.
Align-right means position right, with the rest of the content wrapping around the left side of the image.
Align-center means position center, with no wrap-around (= the rest of the content below the image).

Every theme has a maximum displayed image width http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/maximum-image-width/ so it's important to keep that in mind when posting multiple images side-by-side. If you want two images to be side by side on the same line start by setting the alignment of both images to left. To prevent the staggered effect what you do is insert the following snippet of code into the HTML editor after each image/text pair:
<p style="clear:both;">TEXT HERE</p>