How to Upload Your Own Card Designs on Sams Club
The inquiry
- Why you should trust us
- How we picked and tested
- Our option: Simply to Impress
- Upkeep selection: Nations Photograph Lab
- Best for same-day pickup: Staples
- Other practiced holiday photograph-carte services
- Sustainability and photo cards
- The competition
Why you should trust us
Erin Lodi is a freelance writer reporting on cameras and camera accessories at Wirecutter. She started her career as a photojournalist working in newspapers—shooting film—and was the mobile-imaging editor at DPReview. She is likewise a professional photographer who has made her living photographing everything from rock stars to humpback whales.
Ben Keough wrote several before versions of this guide. He has been roofing cameras, printers, and scanners for Wirecutter for the past three years, and for other publications effectually the web for more than a decade. He's an avid enthusiast lensman and an all-around stickler for image quality.
How we picked and tested
We started our search by thoroughly analyzing the websites of over 30 of the most popular services, weighing what we saw against our ideal features for a custom photo-bill of fare service. To go on to testing, a service had to satisfy several key criteria:
- Great print quality: The best cards should have sharp details and vibrant colors that accurately stand for a wide range of skin tones.
- Nice paper: Those good-looking prints should come up on newspaper that feels smashing—even at the lowest price tier. Typically, this means thick (around 110- to 120-pound) carte stock. There should be a diverseness of photograph finishes to choose from, such as matte, glossy, and satin.
- High-quality, customizable templates: A good vacation photo-card service offers an array of templates to conform a wide variety of occasions, from Halloween and Thanksgiving to Christmas and Kwanzaa. The best services make these templates like shooting fish in a barrel to arrange, augment, and override.
- Easy-to-use site and card architect: If it's a hurting to find a template that fits the photo you lot want to use, you'll probably movement on to a site that makes information technology like shooting fish in a barrel. The all-time services offering plenty of filters to narrow the list of designs. And once you have a template, the card editor should provide useful options (such as actress fonts, borders, and photograph-editing tools) so that it'southward simple to make a nifty-looking card.
- Additional services: Afterwards you get your carte du jour looking the way you want, the service should make it piece of cake to sympathize the different paper, finish, envelope, and addressing options. Ideally, the service volition offering to postal service your envelopes for you (at a cost). For stationery aficionados, fancy extras like decorative envelope liners are another plus.
- Reasonable prices: We think nearly $2.50 per card, including shipping, is the most you should consider paying for custom photo cards. Only if a service tin can deliver on the things higher up for a essentially lower cost, that's a bonus.
From 2018 to 2019, we tested eight services for mail-club holiday photo cards: Minted, Mixbook, Nations Photo Lab, Paper Culture, Simply to Impress, Snapfish, Tiny Prints by Shutterfly, and Vistaprint. But we wanted to provide an option for procrastinators and other last-infinitesimal shoppers also, and our readers were curious as to how they all stacked up. So nosotros tested the most widely available services that offered same-day pickup: CVS, Staples, Walmart, and Walgreens, also as Costco's Premium Stationery cards (Costco has since closed its photograph centers).
For 2020, we retested our picks to encounter whether the quality was still the aforementioned.
We created cards with each service, using the aforementioned photo for each i. When possible, we used similar designs: an edge-to-edge photo with overlaid text across the lower edge. When verso printing was bachelor at no extra charge, we printed the same photo on the rear to see whether cards had a pregnant difference in impress quality from front to back. As we designed the cards, we took additional notes on site usability and upgrade options. Once we'd placed the orders, we kept track of turnaround times and the mode the cards were packaged when they arrived.
Since these cards are going to end up on people'southward fridges or mantels—not hanging in an art gallery—we evaluated print quality, with the expectation that cards should look good enough to most people at a glance. We paid special attention to skin tones, since greeting cards tend to exist people-centric. And we looked for extreme cases of over- or under-saturation and wildly inaccurate contrast. But near of the services we tested delivered prints that looked merely fine.
Pricing is tricky, because these services are constantly offer new promotional coupons, and prices also drop when you guild more cards. Where nosotros mention per-menu prices in this guide, we're referring to the listing prices for 5-past-vii-inch flat cards in packs of 25 or 20. (If yous adopt a smaller size, four-past-6-inch cards are ofttimes cheaper.) All the same, seasonal discounts can exist equally steep as l% to lxx% off these list prices. So if you lot like the sound of a service that we dismiss every bit being too expensive, check that service'due south current specials before writing information technology off.
Our pick: Simply to Impress
Our option
In side-past-side comparisons with cards from other contenders, the holiday photo cards from Only to Print were our favorites, delivering punchy dissimilarity and authentic colors that accentuated skin tones. The easy-to-utilise site lets you create high-quality photograph cards from a wide variety of tasteful, holiday-themed designs, with single- and double-sided layouts and several paper stocks and finishes to cull from. The ordering process is straightforward, with conspicuously defined options and simple image-editing tools. The regular toll per menu was $ii.06 for the unproblematic blueprint nosotros chose in a pack of 25. Just boosted sitewide discounts occur oftentimes, so y'all'll oft encounter a sale. With a brisk turnaround and standard shipping costs, Merely to Impress is a great option for getting those holiday photo cards out to your friends and loved ones with a minimum of fuss.
The nigh difficult function of ordering photo cards is finding the correct pattern among the hundreds of templates most sites offering. Simply to Impress has a comprehensive set of search filters that make this task much easier. This service offers almost 1,900 holiday-themed cards. But filtering the selection to show but, say, New Twelvemonth's greetings with a horizontal format, rounded corners (great for avoiding dings in the post), and a unmarried-photo layout speedily cuts the listing to 200. To avoid having to tediously ringlet through designs that don't suit your needs, yous tin can filter even further, selecting past theme, color, and fashion. That said, Simply to Print likewise offers one of the most comprehensive design libraries we looked at, with a various option of Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Feliz Navidad, New Year's, and neutral season's greetings sentiments.
In tardily 2021, we besides tested PhotoAffections, which is owned by the aforementioned parent company every bit But to Impress. Though some options and pricing are slightly different, the user feel and end product are exactly the same. And then yous might want to visit both sites and look for whichever has the ameliorate sale at that fourth dimension.
Most designs offer two options for card size (four past five½ inches and five past 7 inches) and your option of v paper finishes. Even the most affordable classic card stock (available in matte and satin) feels great. Merely if you footstep up to the more than expensive stocks and finishes (premium matte, sleeky, and pearl shimmer), you lot tin also take reward of included verso (back-side) printing. There's also a luxe double-thick newspaper selection. The free envelopes that come with every social club (y'all can select white or ivory) are thicker than those offered by other services, and they feel dainty in the mitt.
Amongst the services we tested, Only to Impress provided one of the simplest and most intuitive menu-design experiences. The step-by-step interface that guides y'all through the process of personalizing your carte is basically foolproof. Y'all add together a photo by uploading it from your figurer, social media accounts (like Instagram and Facebook), or cloud services (such equally Dropbox and Google Drive). You can also upload images directly from your phone: Just enter your phone number, and Simply to Impress will text you a link. The link volition permit you lot to select phone photos, which instantly appear in your photo library on your desktop. You can identify custom text, choosing the font, size, and color. A handy pop-up window volition appear if you forget to change placeholder text like "The Smith Family." In addition to customer support via telephone, But to Print offers live conversation back up within the card editor—key if you lot accept questions virtually your design and you don't want to keep clicking between windows, which some other services force you to do.
After finalizing the design, you can choose upgrades, like foil-lined envelopes, and addressing and mailing services. (Kudos to you if you accept your entire holiday card recipient list formatted into a spreadsheet!) Simply to Impress offers 1 of the clearest shopping experiences, with the price of each add-on noted throughout the procedure and an itemized listing of your chosen options at checkout (along with links to edit them individually, if you wish).
If you're handy with Photoshop and adopt to design your ain menu from scratch, yous can also cull to upload a custom carte du jour design. Unlike many competing sites, nevertheless, Merely to Impress doesn't offer a discount for create-your-own cards; they price exactly the same equally pre-made designs.
Of the services we tested, Simply to Impress was the only ane to offer a free design review of prototype quality, color, brightness and contrast, and text legibility and positioning. (Additional photo retouching is available for $25.) You lot can opt in or out of this, and if you're on a tight vacation borderline, information technology could slow down your delivery. But we went for the recommended "Only send a proof if there's an outcome with my photo." And we were pleased when the visitor sent us a link via text to approve a change to our proof (it suggested moving the text overlay then it wasn't covering any faces in our photo). The process was polish and piece of cake to approve from a smartphone.
For our examination order, we chose the least expensive Standard Shipping choice, at $8.75, and our cards came to my rural Idaho home in 3 business organization days. We signed up for shipping updates, and nosotros received a text and email update when the lodge was shipped and when information technology was delivered, with links to USPS tracking. Inside the shipping box we discovered an elegant gift box containing our cards, a personalized give thanks-y'all note, and an actress card and envelope in case there was a final-infinitesimal improver to our mailing listing. These classy touches were a pleasant surprise that went a step beyond what most other services offered.
Budget choice: Nations Photo Lab
Budget pick
If you're on a tight budget, the holiday photo cards from Nations Photograph Lab (a pick in our guide to online print services) come up very shut to matching the quality of our superlative pick's cards, for a lot less money. The downsides? The user experience was clumsier, and the quality wasn't as good as with Merely to Impress.
Nations Photo Lab's carte editor is both more powerful and less convenient than the one at Simply to Impress. Y'all take to create an business relationship and upload images before you lot start customizing your card. And, unlike other editors, the Nations Photo Lab editor can't import photos from social media or cloud-storage accounts, though its app can. Blueprint enthusiasts will love the option to add borders, extra text boxes, alternative photo layouts, and a variety of patterned backgrounds. Only customers with no experience using layout programs may feel a bit overwhelmed. However, photographers will complaining the lack of photo-editing tools: You lot can simply zoom or rotate images, which could easily become annoying if you're working with a multi-image pattern and realize one photo needs a fleck of brightening. That means you have to edit the paradigm elsewhere and reimport information technology—a real nuisance that Nations Photo Lab can't accommodate (whereas other services we tried tin).
But the savings can exist meaning with Nations Photo Lab. The carte we designed was $1.31 per card—about 75¢ less per carte compared with Simply to Impress, or $18.75 less for a pack of 25. Shipping is free if you order more than $59 worth of cards; otherwise, available shipping rates were well-nigh average and started at $8.
You lot take a choice of six different paper stocks, and the prints on the semi-gloss paper we ordered had pleasing dissimilarity and tones, if slightly overexposed. (We left whatever color correction settings enabled for each service we tested, and some did better than others at adjusting our paradigm, which was slightly shadowy to begin with. We recommend that you lot start with a well-exposed image. But since shadows are a common upshot in everyday photography, it was useful in our testing to see how well each service corrected our paradigm.) Nations Photo Lab offers neither addressing nor carte-mailing services, and no design-review services.
We selected standard shipping for $x and had our cards in three days, nestled safely within a sturdy cardboard box with some newspaper packaging. Though the card stock and envelopes weren't as thick as those of our top selection, the quality is perfectly fine for delivering a chip of transitory holiday cheer.
All-time for same-day pickup: Staples
Also nifty
We didn't love whatever of the options nosotros tested for same-day pickup. But if yous need holiday photo cards pronto, Staples delivers the best combination of impress and paper quality, ease of use, and handy customer service tools, like live chat without leaving the design experience. The Staples menu designer includes hundreds of templates but not a lot of customization options. Our cards had squeamish color and sharpness, though they were noticeably darker than those from our other picks. The sleeky card stock felt plenty thick, and our final cost was just nether a dollar per carte du jour, including blank white envelopes.
Staples offers plenty of nice-looking templates, merely it as well has a lot more cheesy, clip-fine art-heavy designs than most other services. That makes the scrolling extra-frustrating. Staples also has a strange option we didn't come across anywhere else: the ability to add a Shutterstock prototype to your menu. Perhaps if you run out of time to have that family unit photo taken this yr, this could exist another time-saving resource?
The Staples card editor is simpler to use than those of nigh other services we tested. Y'all can upload images from your computer or import them from Dropbox, Google Drive, or Skydrive (but not from social media accounts). And if yous want to tweak the provided designs, yous can easily add extra text boxes or images. You lot'll see a few quirks, such as the inability to drag photos to reposition them inside provided template frames, but even beginners should exist comfortable hither. A clever preview screen shows the front and back of your carte du jour, offers a PDF download version, and asks you to tick a box to ostend your review before proceeding.
Pricing is lower than that of even our budget choice: Pre-made designs start at 80¢ per bill of fare on regular glossy or matte stock. You lot tin opt for premium paper at an extra forty¢ per menu, simply doing so adds iii to five days of processing time. And so at that point you'd be amend off merely going with 1 of our other picks. Staples has a 2 p.m. cutoff for aforementioned-day turnaround, and though an eight-hour pickup window was costless, express pickup (under four hours) was $6. An optional courier commitment service was $15 and wasn't available in my rural boondocks in Idaho, only if you live in a larger town with a Staples, that might be an splendid consideration.
Staples also gives you the pick of buying any pre-made blueprint for home commitment. These cards come on premium paper, bundled with render-addressed envelopes, and they generally start at $1 per card in packs of 25. Shipping started at $5 during the fourth dimension of our most recent testing.
Other good holiday photo-menu services
If you prefer a minimalist design on environmentally conscious card stock: Artifact Uprising offers make clean, modern designs, a simple user experience, and 100% recycled card stock and envelopes. Sometimes less is more than, and that's the case when it comes to bill of fare creation via Antiquity Uprising: Control over each design is limited, and there are few photo-editing tools (though you could also upload your own design). The Artifact Uprising app offers even fewer customization options, but during the busy holiday flavor, having fewer choices might feel just right. Addressing and mailing services are available.
If sustainability is your pinnacle priority and you want a wider variety of designs than Antiquity Uprising offers: Paper Culture's cards are fabricated of 100% post-consumer waste, and the company says it works with several non-profit groups to found a tree for every order. That's all absurd, and we besides like the site'southward straightforward design, useful filters, and particularly in-depth editing suite. It fifty-fifty offers gratis design assistance for those who aren't confident in their skills, with free digital proofs. Even so, like Minted and Shutterfly, Paper Culture is far more than expensive than Simply to Impress on a per-menu basis.
If you want a budget-friendly two-sided card and aren't too worried most a perfect impress: Mixbook is like shooting fish in a barrel to use and offers many 2-sided design options, but it didn't produce the near vibrant or accurate print in our testing. Our card from Mixbook looked a fiddling washed out, which bugs the states (especially when it comes to an accurate representation of peel tones). Everything else about the service is groovy: The site has a powerful card editor with loads of photo-editing tools, allows for fully custom card designs, and includes verso press in almost templates. That makes it even more cost-efficient if you want a two-sided pattern, since some services, including Simply to Print, charge for the option. Mixbook doesn't offering a mailing service, but information technology as well doesn't print a logo anywhere on your carte du jour. And information technology does have a powerful app, with all the editing tools you might need to design a card right on your telephone.
Sustainability and photo cards
If yous're feeling conflicted about whether the good intentions of a heartfelt vacation carte outweigh the environmental consequences, choosing a more sustainable carte might assist you feel more responsible. While more photograph-menu services are offer a recycled-paper option, a couple of the companies we've researched and tested have made strong commitments to creating eco-friendly cards. Artifact Uprising uses 100% recycled paper, and its envelopes even note that difference—which may exist an important bulletin you lot'd similar to share with your recipients. Paper Culture uses recycled papers every bit well every bit bamboo in its cards, envelopes, and packaging, and it promises to plant a tree with every order.
Your recipients may too be thinking near sustainability and the cards they receive. And so when you're designing your photo bill of fare, keep in listen that additions like foil or glitter may mean the carte du jour you're creating can't exist recycled.
If y'all'd prefer to avoid using paper altogether, there are several digital-simply card services available. Of course, the transient nature of an e-card may not deliver the aforementioned feelings that a fabric object can manifest—both upon inflow and on brandish throughout the holiday flavour. If you choose to go this direction for some or all of your cards, Greenvelope sends an especially attractive blitheness of your customized carte gliding out of a personalized envelope, complete with stamp, liner, and wax seal of your choice. And it can prompt an RSVP response or allow yous to attach a digital souvenir card. If you lot really want to take fun with a digital greeting, services like JibJab can help you create a silly vacation animated video featuring the faces of your unabridged family in minutes.
The competition
In add-on to our picks, we found a number of other photo-carte du jour services that we thought did a good task, even if they had some shortcomings. If y'all spot a killer deal from one of these services, and you aren't bothered past the caveats we mention, don't hesitate to utilise them. Nosotros also found a few services that we wouldn't recommend most people utilize.
Minted is far more expensive than our pinnacle choice, simply its site is piece of cake to use, and it has lots of lovely designs that you can customize with dissimilar holiday greetings and accent colors. Minted provides even more extras than But to Impress, like free recipient addressing and custom postage stamps, and it offers $1 proofs that get credited back if you subsequently place an order. Nonetheless, though our cards looked groovy overall and came in beautiful packaging, each of them had a thin line down the left side. Printing errors happen, and chances are skillful you lot wouldn't take the same effect. But we institute this disheartening all the same.
Shutterfly (which owns Tiny Prints by Shutterfly, and is basically an identical service) is expensive, like Minted and Paper Civilisation, but Shutterfly offers fewer options and extras. We're disappointed when we tin't practice much to prepare a photograph within the card editing software—a practice that's essentially part of every Instagram post. Our holiday photos looked adept and came on thick stock, and the service has plenty of templates to choose from, with useful filters for finding the right pattern. Recipient and render addressing as well equally a mailing service are all bachelor for an added fee. For the price, there are ameliorate services that offer more than customizations.
Snapfish has an easy-to-use site with plenty of bonny templates. Its card editor is simple to use, and you get free verso press with most designs. And upgrading to premium card stock gets you free trim options and free return addressing. Our cards definitely looked good enough. Just, once again, the prices were higher than for our top pick, and the packaging was disappointing. Our cards came in a generic white envelope without whatever padding, and 1 of the loosely bundled envelopes was crushed.
Vistaprint has fairly attractive pricing, but the site is non as intuitive to use, and our cards printed a tad on the night side. Though the carte du jour stock was on a par with that of the contest, the included envelopes were very thin and meet-through. For some unknown reason, Vistaprint offers an unusually sized 4.6-by-7.2-inch card, instead of the standard 5-by-7-inch one. Vistaprint allows you lot to preview each design with your image, and it's a snap to add in a QR code (which could be a beautiful way to as well share a family unit blog or online photo gallery). It'due south easy plenty to manipulate design elements and edit photos, and verso printing is included. Vistaprint doesn't offer recipient address printing or a mailing service.
Walmart provides an piece of cake user interface for creating same-mean solar day photograph cards, with plenty of tools for manipulating text and photos (if non many custom options). Unlike our superlative pick for same-day services, Walmart offers verso press at no additional charge. However, nosotros were disappointed with the slightly blurry and red-tinted prints we picked upwardly.
CVS produced same-twenty-four hour period holiday photo cards that disappointed united states for several reasons. First, they were the just cards we tested that didn't come with envelopes. They as well came two to a perforated sheet, giving each card an ugly, rough edge. Finally, the print quality was bottomless, suffering from horribly distorted colors, wildly excessive dissimilarity, and poor sharpness.
Walgreens photo cards are available for same-mean solar day pickup, but ours came out with a strong blue-green tint and visible perforations along the edges. Additionally, our first club had to be rerouted to a less-user-friendly store location, considering the printer at the closest Walgreens was on the fritz. The experience was less than confidence-inspiring, peculiarly considering that many people don't live in a town with more than i Walgreens.
Though we previously recommended Costco's Premium Stationery cards for same-day selection-upward, the visitor has shut downward its photo centers, so we accept removed these as a choice.
Before testing, nosotros weeded out xvi additional holiday photograph-bill of fare services considering they didn't meet our basic criteria: Printique, Amazon Prints, CardsDirect, Cardstore, Collage.com, MOO, Mpix, Newspaper Source, Picaboo, Postable, UPrinting, York Photograph, Target, Etsy, Magnetstreet, and Zazzle.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/our-favorite-custom-photo-card-service/
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