Many WordPress themes, especially those with “magazine-like” layouts, use an image to represent each post. It might just be on the front page. It might be alone, or alongside an excerpt. Until now, there was no standardized way to do this. Many themes would require you to tediously enter a Custom Field with the value being the URL you wanted to use. Often you had to do cropping yourself. With WordPress 2.9, theme authors can easily enable Post Thumbnail selection UI and call those image using simple template tags.