The Best Holiday Photo Cards - The New York Times

Posted: 15 Jan 2021 12:00 AM PST

In addition to our picks, we found a number of other holiday photo card services that we thought did a good job, even if they had some shortcomings. If you spot a killer deal from one of these services, and you aren't bothered by the caveats we mention, don't hesitate to use them. We also found a few services that we wouldn't recommend most people use.

Services we liked

Mixbook produced holiday cards that looked nearly as good as what we got from our top pick. The site has a powerful card editor, allows for fully custom card designs, and includes verso printing in most templates. That makes it a good budget option if you want a two-sided design, since adding that feature with our budget pick results in a nearly identical total price. Compared with our top pick, Mixbook is missing a few features (such as mailing service), and its packaging isn't as nice, but it's a great alternative if you catch a good sale.

Minted is far more expensive than our top pick, but its site is easy to use and has lots of beautiful designs that you can customize with different holiday greetings and accent colors. Minted provides even more extras than Simply to Impress, such as free recipient addressing and custom postage stamps, and it offers $1 proofs that get credited back if you subsequently place an order. However, although our cards looked great overall and came in beautiful packaging, each of them had a thin line down the left side. Printing errors happen—and chances are, you wouldn't have the same issue—but we found it disheartening all the same.

Paper Culture focuses on sustainability as well as on modern design, which shows in its especially hip, typography-focused templates. The two available paper options are both 100 percent post-consumer recycled, and the company plants a tree for every order. That's all cool, but we also like the site's straightforward design, useful filters, and particularly in-depth editing suite. It even offers free design assistance for those who aren't confident in their skills, with free digital proofs. However, like Minted and Tiny Prints, Paper Culture is far more expensive than our top pick on a per-card basis.

Services we didn't like

Tiny Prints by Shutterfly is expensive like Minted and Paper Culture but offers fewer options and extras. Our holiday photos looked good and came on thick stock, and the service has plenty of templates to choose from with useful filters. Recipient and return addressing are available for an added fee, and so is mailing service (you pay for postage). But packaging for bulk delivery was disappointing: Our cards came in a bright orange Shutterfly box with no padding, leaving the shrink-wrapped cards and envelopes bouncing around inside.

Snapfish has an easy-to-use site with plenty of attractive templates. Its card editor is simple, and you get free verso printing with most designs. Upgrading to premium card stock gets you free trim options and free return addressing. Our cards definitely looked good enough, but 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 any padding, and one of the loosely bundled envelopes was crushed.

Vistaprint has attractive pricing, but our photo cards came with a sickly green-gray tint that made our subjects' skin look awfully unattractive. In addition, the supposedly 5-by-7-inch card turned out to be wider and shorter than any other card we tested—more like 4½ by 5¼ inches. As with Snapfish, the Vistaprint cards came shoved in a FedEx-style envelope without padding.

Walmart makes same-day photo cards only on linen card stock with a heavily textured surface that isn't friendly to photos. Our cards looked low-res and washed-out, and the texture's wrinkles made faces look especially unattractive.

CVS produced same-day holiday photo cards that disappointed us for several reasons. First, they were the only cards we tested that didn't come with envelopes. They also came two to a perforated sheet, giving each card an ugly, rough edge. Finally, the print quality was abysmal, suffering from horribly distorted colors, wildly excessive contrast, and poor sharpness.

Walgreens photo cards are available for same-day pickup, but ours came out with a strong blue-green tint and visible perforations along the edges. Additionally, our first order had to be rerouted to a less convenient store location, because the printer at the closest Walgreens was on the fritz. The experience was less than confidence-inspiring, especially considering that many people don't live in a town with more than one Walgreens.

While we previously recommended Costso's Premium Stationery Cards, the company will be shutting down its photo centers, so we have removed them as a pick.

Other services we considered

Before testing, we weeded out 14 additional holiday photo card services because they didn't meet our basic criteria: Printique, Amazon Prints, Artifact Uprising, CardsDirect, Cardstore, Collage.com, MOO, Mpix, Paper Source, Picaboo, Postable, UPrinting, York Photo, and Zazzle.

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