Not.
The other day I got this great idea. I’m really liking this digital photography thing - it’s become my habit to grab the camera every time I go for a walk. And I’m getting what I think are some pretty good pictures - when you shoot a couple thousand pictures the percentages are in your favor, right? ;)
So while I’ve been posting many of the good ones over on my Photo Blog, I wanted to get more mileage out of them by using them as Thank You notes - post card style.
So there’s the idea in a nutshell: My images, on postcards, sitting in my backpack ready to fill out and drop in the mail at a moment’s notice.
Sounds simple, right? You’d think.
The first thought was CafePress. One of their product options is postcards. So I setup a shop, uploaded my pics, setup the product, and ordered a set. By the time I add shipping I’m over $1/per card, so $1.25 by the time I mail one out. Too much for my Dutch blood.
Next up - looking at commercial printers. A quick Google Search nets a good number of places willing to print post cards at more reasonable rates than CafePress. But I don’t want 1000! Or even 250. I want like a dozen of each good picture, so I’m not using the snow ones in June, or having to stock boxes of these things for years.
I ran across Amazing Mail, which lets you upload digital pictures, enter or upload your contact lists, choose a recipient, enter a message, and submit a card. They print it out and mail it out for you. Cost about $1/card. Neat technology, not bad price, no big quantities, but it took longer to do on-line than if I had a pre-stamped card sitting in my backpack and I also don’t want to lose the personal touch of a handwritten note.
Ofoto?, SnapFish?. Nope - no simple postcards - either they use envelopes or they add 2” on one end of the photo for a message.
So back to doing my own - digital prints are to be had locally from $.20 to $.29 - why not just print out a dozen of each image, slap a label on the back, and call it a postcard?
Didn’t sound hard to me either.
The first snag - cropping. This may be a silly question, but why are digital cameras shooting a different shape picture than the photo developers are printing? Or, why doesn’t my digital camera have a “shoot to print’ mode? All I wanted to do was add a copyright date, an image title, and my URL to the bottom of every picture - in hopes that peope would stick these on their cube walls and I’d get some advertising. 5 trips to Walgreens later and I *think* I’ve finally got it to where my added text isn’t being cropped out. Basically I had to scale the images way down so they’ll print with a large border of white, then we’ll use my wife’s scrapbooking tools to physically crop the excess white off.
It’d be a whole lot easier if Walgreen’s system was truly capable of showing me on-screen what I was going to get, but the difference in what shows on screen to what comes out in the end still 1/8” - 3/16” on a 4x6 print - not great tolerances.
The second snag - labels. Hey Avery - here’s an idea! Make a slightly less than 4x6 label setup to mimic the back of a postcard! The closest I could find was a 3.3” x 4” shipping label. It’ll work, but it’d be nice to cover up more of the photo paper text.
So there you have it - one of those projects that sounds “easy” in this day and age of booming digital technology. But a day and a half later and I’m not done yet…
Any ideas on better solutions here would be appreciated.
Drop me a postcard.
Comments are closed, but you can read the comments other people left.
Ken on March 02, 2004
Dave J. on March 02, 2004
Michael Boyink (Author) on March 02, 2004
Michael Boyink (Author) on March 03, 2004