Apple iPhoto Holiday Cards

Now that our little family is growing we decided to do holiday photo cards this year. The possibilities for these cards are nearly endless but I wanted to create a double-sided card that was printed on card stock (as opposed to a single-sided card printed on photo paper). After a quick look online it seemed like our favorite vendors were charging anywhere between $2.00 to $2.55 and that didn't even include a custom message on the back.

First things first though. A friend of ours is a semi-professional photographer and he was kind enough to set up a little home studio to take pictures of us. It was a quick photoshoot; 30 minutes to shoot about 150 frames. I've never been to one of those places at the mall but I'm assuming that they probably don't take quite so many pictures. Because we were taking so many we could relax and take a few un-posed pictures. In fact, my favorite picture of the photoshoot was one where I was just fooling around and snapping a few pictures myself.

So, once we had our photos we took a look at our options. We've used Purple Stork in the past and we really like the designs at InABabyCarriage.com. However, we really wanted to go with something a little less expensive. Instead, I fired up iPhoto (version 6) on our Apple laptop.

Making the card was ridiculously simple. The hardest part was just choosing what design we wanted. After we picked that out (we went with Holiday Wreath) we just typed in our greeting for the front and back. It wasn't completely obvious, but if you hit Command-T you can bring up the font menu and switch any text to a fancy font like Zapfino.

Ordering the cards couldn't have been simpler. We just click the 'Buy Card' button and specify the quantity we want. Since we already have an Apple account (to buy music from iTunes) we don't even have to type in our address. Finally, we selected Express shipping since it only added $2 to our order.

Our cards arrived about a week later (so plan ahead!). Apple ships them in little white boxes which hold about 20 cards and the included envelopes. Since these were postcard style cards all we had to do was address and stuff the envelopes! Apple also offers a greeting card style card if you want something you can sign inside.

Overall, we're really happy with the service. The cards themselves came out great and they were really easy to make. We've already had several compliments about our cards as well! I will definitely be using this service again and recommend it to all our loyal readers.

December 5, 2006

Apple iPhoto Holiday Cards