latex question about wrapping

coolnessitself

I don't know of any good latex forums and figured people around here have used it before. So.
I've got a multicols environment and I'm using
http://www.tug.org/TeXnik/multicols/...leWithPics.pdf
to keep figures in each column. It simply creates a minipage environment and places the image in that. The problem is the positioning. The nice thing about regular figures is you can say [htbp] and it will find a spot for you. The 2column minipage code, however, places the image precisely where you add it. In a multicolumn environment this creates wrapping problems. If the image is too large, it will jump to the next page and leave a large whitespace.

Is there a latex command to tell the compiler to choose a location like the figure environment does and wrap text around it, but for any environment (i.e. minipage)?