The Best Holiday Photo Cards

Erin Roberts 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 also a professional photographer who has made her living capturing images of everything from rock stars to humpback whales.

Ben Keough wrote several earlier versions of this guide. He has been covering cameras, printers, and scanners for Wirecutter since 2015, and for other publications around the web for more than a decade. He’s an avid enthusiast photographer and an all-around stickler for image quality.

We started our search by analyzing the websites of more than 40 of the most popular services, weighing what we saw against our ideal features for a custom photo-card service. To proceed 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 represent a wide range of skin tones.
• Nice paper: Those good-looking prints should come on paper that feels great—even at the lowest price tier. Typically, this means thick (around 110- to 120-pound) card stock. There should be a variety of photo finishes to choose from, such as matte, glossy, and satin.
• High-quality, customizable templates: A good holiday photo-card service offers an array of templates to suit a wide variety of occasions, from Halloween and Thanksgiving to Christmas and Kwanzaa. The best services make these templates easy to adjust, augment, and override.
• Easy-to-use site and card builder: If it’s a pain to find a template that fits the photo you want to use, you’ll probably move on to a site that makes it easy. The best services offer plenty of filters to narrow the list of designs. And once you have a template, the card editor should provide useful options (such as extra fonts, borders, and photo-editing tools), so that it’s simple to make a great-looking card.
• Additional services: After you get your card looking the way you want, the service should make it easy to understand the different paper, finish, envelope, and addressing options. Ideally, the service will offer to mail your envelopes for you (at a cost). For stationery aficionados, fancy extras like decorative envelope liners are another plus.
• Reasonable prices: We think about $2.50 per 5-by-7-inch card, including shipping, is the most you should consider paying for custom photo cards. But if a service can deliver on the above things for a substantially lower price, that’s a bonus.

For testing, we created cards using the same photo for each service. When possible, we used a similar design: an edge-to-edge photo with overlaid text across the lower edge. When backside (or “verso”) printing was available at no extra charge, we printed the same photo on the rear to see whether cards had a significant difference in print quality from front to back.

As we designed the cards, we took notes on site usability and upgrade options. Once we’d placed the orders, we kept track of turnaround times and assessed how the cards had been packaged when they arrived.

Since these cards are going to end up on people’s 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 be people-centric. And we looked for extreme cases of over- or under-saturation and wildly inaccurate contrast. But most of the services we tested delivered prints that looked just fine.

Pricing is tricky, because these services are constantly offering new promotional coupons, and prices also drop when you order more cards.

Where we mention per-card prices in this guide, we’re referring to the list prices for 5-by-7-inch flat cards in packs of 25 or 20. (If you prefer a smaller size, 4-by-6-inch cards are often cheaper.) However, seasonal discounts can be as steep as 50% to 70% off these list prices. So if you like the sound of a service that we dismiss as being too expensive, check that service’s current specials before writing it off.

In side-by-side comparisons with cards from other contenders, the holiday photo cards from Simply to Impress were our favorites, delivering accurate colors that accentuated skin tones. The easy-to-use site lets you create high-quality photo cards from a wide variety of tasteful, holiday-themed designs, with many layout, paper-stock, and finish options to choose from. The ordering process is straightforward, with clearly defined options and simple image-editing tools.

It’s the easiest to find the right design for you. The most difficult part of ordering photo cards might be filtering through the hundreds of templates many sites offer. Simply to Impress has a comprehensive set of search filters, and they make it much easier to find something that suits you, compared with using other sites. And this service has over 2,000 holiday-themed cards.

But filtering the selection to show only, say, New Year’s greetings with a horizontal format, rounded corners (great for avoiding dings in the mail), and a single-photo layout quickly cuts the list to 252. To avoid having to scroll through designs that don’t fit your needs, you can filter even further, selecting by theme, color, and style.

It has the widest array of themes. Simply to Impress also offers one of the most comprehensive design libraries we looked at, with a diverse selection of Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Feliz Navidad, New Year’s, and neutral season’s greetings sentiments.

You can customize almost everything. Most designs offer two options for card size (4 by 5.5 inches and 5 by 7 inches) and your choice of five paper finishes. Even the most affordable classic card stock (available in matte and satin) feels great. If you splurge on the premium card stock, at 50¢ more per card, you can choose from matte, glossy, and pearl shimmer finishes, and you can incorporate a backside design. There’s also a double-thick paper option.

The card-design process is easy. Among the services we tested, Simply to Impress provided one of the simplest and most intuitive card-design experiences. The step-by-step interface guiding you through the process of personalizing your card is basically foolproof.

You add a photo by uploading it from your computer, social media accounts (like Instagram and Facebook), or cloud services (such as 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 will allow you to select phone photos, which instantly appear in your photo library on your desktop.

You can place custom text, choosing the font, size, and color. If you forget to change placeholder text, like “The Smith Family,” a handy pop-up window will appear.

It has live design support. In addition to customer support via phone, Simply to Impress offers live chat support within the card editor. This is key if you have questions about your design and don’t want to keep clicking between windows, which some other services force you to do.

The free envelopes are of extremely high quality. The envelopes that come with every order (you can select white or ivory) are thicker than those offered by other services, and they feel nice in the hand.

After finalizing the design, you can choose upgrades, like foil-lined envelopes, and addressing and mailing services. Kudos to you if you have your entire holiday-card list formatted into a spreadsheet, but you can also manually input each recipient’s address.

The pricing is very straightforward. Simply to Impress offers one of the clearest shopping experiences, with the price of each add-on noted throughout the process and an itemized list of your chosen options at checkout (along with links to edit them individually, if you wish).

It’s the only service that offers free design review. Simply to Impress was the only card service we tested that offered a free digital design review of image quality, color, brightness and contrast, and text legibility and positioning. (Additional photo retouching is available for $25.) You can opt in or out of this, and if you’re on a tight holiday deadline, it could slow down your delivery.

In our 2021 testing, we opted for the recommended “Only send a proof if there’s an issue with my photo.” And we were pleased when the company sent us a link via text to approve a change to our proof (it suggested moving the text overlay so it wasn’t covering any faces in our photo). The process was smooth and easy to approve from a smartphone.

The shipping is reasonably priced and fast. For our test order, we chose the least expensive standard shipping option (the company estimates two to five business days), at $8.75. And our cards came to my rural Idaho home in three business days, arriving in good condition in a thin cardboard envelope. We signed up for shipping updates, and we received a text and email update when the order was shipped and when it was delivered, with links to USPS tracking.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

If you’re handy with Photoshop and prefer to design your own card from scratch, you can also choose to upload a custom card design. However, unlike many competing sites, Simply to Impress doesn’t offer a discount for create-your-own cards; they cost exactly the same as premade designs.

If you’re on a tight budget, Nations Photo Lab’s holiday photo cards come very close to matching the quality of our top pick’s cards, for a lot less money. The downsides? The user experience was clumsier, and the overall quality wasn’t quite as good as with Simply to Impress.

Its design editor is more powerful but less user-friendly. You have to create an account and upload images before you start customizing your card. And, unlike with other services, the Nations Photo Lab editor can’t import photos from social media or cloud-storage accounts, though its app can.

Design enthusiasts will love the option to add borders, extra text boxes, alternative photo layouts, and a variety of patterned backgrounds. But customers with no experience using layout programs may feel a bit overwhelmed. Indeed, because there are no free back-of-card layout templates that include an image, you’re forced to either do a bit of design work yourself or pay an extra $5 more per pack to choose a template with images.

It doesn’t allow in-app photo editing. More-experienced photographers will lament the lack of photo-editing tools: You can only zoom or rotate images, and this could easily become annoying if you’re working with a multi-image design and realize one photo needs a bit of brightening. In that case, you have to edit the image elsewhere and import it again—a real nuisance that Nations Photo Lab can’t accommodate (whereas other services we tried can).

But the savings can be significant with Nations Photo Lab. The card we designed was $1.36 per card—about 70¢ less per card compared with Simply to Impress, or $17.61 less for a pack of 25. (Nations Photo Lab allows for orders only in increments of 25, so keep that in mind if you’re ordering a smaller number of cards or somewhere in between.) Shipping is free if you order more than $79 worth of cards; otherwise, available shipping rates were about average and started at $8.

You have a choice of six paper stocks, and the prints on the semigloss paper we ordered were the most color accurate of our testing, and most closely matched skin tones. (For each service we tested, we left any color correction settings enabled, and some did better than others at adjusting our image, which was slightly shadowy to begin with. We recommend that you start with a well-exposed image. But since shadows are a common issue in everyday photography, it was useful in our testing to see how well each service corrected our image.) Nations Photo Lab offers neither addressing nor card-mailing services, and no design-review services.

We selected economy shipping for $8 and had our cards in three days, shrink-wrapped inside a thickly padded envelope. Though the card stock and envelopes weren’t as thick as those of our top pick, the quality is perfectly fine for delivering a bit of transitory holiday cheer.

If you like the idea of designing a holiday card in the palm of your hand, Mixbook offers a very good app experience. The holiday cards we created with this service came out very much like those from our top pick, though Mixbook won’t stamp and send out your cards for you. But it does have a saturation slider, for making your photos a bit more vibrant. Mixbook also has free double-sided printing and a couple of photo filters that Simply to Impress doesn’t have, and its cards cost a bit less.

Mixbook has some of the best photo-editing tools of any service we tested. This may save you time if you’re incorporating several images into your design. If you’re using a combination of professional photos and smartphone snapshots, the sliders for contrast, saturation, and brightness can help make your images appear more consistent—as well as align with the card’s design aesthetic—without you having to edit the images in another platform and re-import them back into your design.

Double-sided printing is free. Mixbook offers double-sided printing at no charge, with a wide selection of 127 layout templates for the back of your card. By comparison, when we designed a card using Simply to Impress during our testing period, the service charged an additional 50¢ per card for verso printing, with only 10 back-of-card design templates available.

The mobile app experience is nearly identical to its desktop service. The Mixbook app makes it easy to upload images from your phone, Google Photos, Facebook, Instagram, or SmugMug with a tap. Simply to Impress does not currently offer an app.

Mixbook has fewer design options. Though it offers fewer designs than our top pick, there are over 600 holiday cards to choose from, so the selection still feels ample. There are enough filters to help narrow your choices efficiently, including some interesting size options (in addition to the standard 5 by 7), such as 4 by 8, 3.5 by 5, and 5 by 5.

There’s no minimum order size. Mixbook encourages personalization with lots of layouts, backgrounds, and stickers, and it was one of the only services we found that allowed you to order any number of cards, starting at just one. The per-card price can start at around $2.50 when you’re ordering only a few, but that’s still better than ordering cards you don’t need. Paper options include satin, matte, pearl, premium matte, cotton texture, and luxe board.

The pricing is about the same as for our top pick. The final 25-card packs we ordered from each service were fairly close in price. The regular pricing for Simply to Impress was $2.06 per card versus $1.78 per card for Mixbook, with similar standard shipping pricing. Both services charge about the same amount for address printing, and plain white envelopes are included, though our top pick delivered slightly thicker envelopes. All of these services regularly offer many price drops and discount codes, so the pricing might be a little different for you than it was for us.

If you need holiday photo cards pronto, Staples—out of all the same-day-pickup services we tested—delivers the best combination of print and paper quality, ease of use, and handy customer service tools, such as live chat without leaving the design experience. Our other top picks offer cuter and more customizable designs and a better overall user experience, but if you’re in a hurry, this service is the best option.

The Staples card designer includes hundreds of templates but not a lot of customization options. There are plenty of nice-looking templates, but there are also many more cheesy, clip-art-heavy designs than with most other services. That makes the scrolling extra-frustrating. Staples also has an option that we didn’t see anywhere else: the ability to add a Shutterstock image to your card. Perhaps if you run out of time to have that family photo taken this year, this could be another time-saving resource.

You can add a QR code, a tool that could easily direct recipients to a family blog or recent Facebook photo album, in lieu of the old-fashioned printed Christmas letter filled with family updates.

Our test cards looked good. The cards had nice color and sharpness, with skin-tone accuracy that was on a par with that of Nations Photo Lab.

The paper was above average in quality. The matte card stock (then just under $1 per card) felt plenty thick. The included blank white envelopes were thin but serviceable.

The editor is simpler to use than those of most other services we tested. You can upload images from your computer or import them from Dropbox, Google Drive, or Skydrive (but not from social media accounts). And if you want to tweak the provided designs, you can easily add extra text boxes or images.

You’ll encounter a few quirks, such as not being able to drag photos to reposition them inside provided template frames, but even beginners should be comfortable here. Reverse-side printing is 20¢ more per card. A clever preview screen shows the front and back of your card, offers a PDF download version, and asks you to tick a box to confirm your review before proceeding.

Pricing is lower than for our budget pick. Premade designs start at $1 per card on glossy or matte stock. You can opt for premium paper at an extra 40¢ per card, but doing so adds three to five days of processing time. So at that point you’d be better off just going with one of our other picks. Staples has a 2 p.m. cutoff for same-day turnaround, and though an eight-hour pickup window was free, express pickup (under four hours) was $9. An optional courier delivery service was $15 and wasn’t available in my rural town in Idaho. But if you live in a larger town with a Staples, that might be an excellent consideration.

Staples also gives you the option of buying any premade design for home delivery. These cards come on premium paper, bundled with return-addressed envelopes, and they generally start at $1.40 per card in packs of 25, with free shipping.

If you prefer a minimalist design on environmentally conscious card stock: Artifact Uprising offers clean, modern designs, a simple user experience, and 100% recycled cardstock and envelopes. 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 season, having fewer choices might feel just right. Return and recipient addressing is available, but this service will not mail the cards on your behalf.

If sustainability is your top priority and you want a wider variety of designs: The cards from Paper Culture are made of 100% post-consumer waste, and the company says it works with several nonprofit groups to plant a tree for every order. That’s all cool, and 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. It will also print your return and recipient addresses and mail your cards for you, starting at 69¢ each, plus the cost of the stamp.

If you want sustainability and ship-for-you service: Postable will address and mail your holiday cards for you, using 100% post-consumer recycled paper and envelopes. You’ll pay a bit more for the peace of mind and convenience: about 73¢ more per card than standard pricing for our top pick with the same add-ons, not including the cost of stamps. Though lacking in customization options, the site was straightforward and simple to use. Our test prints were oversaturated, but the cardstock felt thick and luxe, as did the kraft envelopes.

If you’re feeling conflicted about whether the good intentions of a heartfelt holiday card outweigh the environmental consequences, a more sustainably produced card may help you feel more responsible. Although more photo-card services are offering 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 be an important message you’d like to share with your recipients. Paper Culture uses recycled papers as well as bamboo in its cards, envelopes, and packaging, and it promises to plant a tree with every order. Postable uses 100% post-consumer recycled paper and envelopes.

Your recipients may also be thinking about sustainability and the cards they receive. So when you’re designing your photo card, keep in mind that additions like foil or glitter may mean the card you’re creating can’t be recycled.

If you’d prefer to avoid using paper altogether, there are several digital-only card services available. Of course, the transient nature of an e-card may not deliver the same feelings that a material object can manifest—both upon arrival and on display throughout the holiday season. If you choose to go this direction, Greenvelope sends an especially attractive animation of your customized card 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 you to attach a digital gift card. If you really want to have fun with a digital greeting, services like JibJab can help you create a silly holiday animated video featuring the faces of your entire family in minutes.

Minted is far more expensive than our top pick. But the site is easy to use, and it has lots of lovely designs that you can customize with different holiday greetings and accent colors. Minted provides even more extras than Simply to Impress, including free recipient addressing and custom postage stamps. And it offers $1 proofs, which get credited back if you subsequently place an order. However, though 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 good you wouldn’t have the same issue. But we found this disheartening all the same.

Shutterfly (which owns Tiny Prints by Shutterfly, and is basically an identical service) is expensive, like Minted and Paper Culture, but Shutterfly offers fewer options and extras. We’re disappointed when we can’t do much to fix a photo within the card-editing software. Our holiday photos looked good and came on thick stock, and the service has plenty of templates to choose from, with useful filters for finding the right design. Recipient and return addressing, as well as a mailing service, are all available for an added fee. For the price, there are better services that offer more customizations.

Snapfish has an easy-to-navigate site with plenty of attractive templates. Its card editor is simple to use, and you get free verso printing with most designs. Also, upgrading to premium card stock gets you free trim options and free return addressing. Our cards looked good enough. But the prices were higher than those of Simply to Impress, 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 fairly attractive pricing, but the site is not as intuitive to use, and our cards printed a tad on the dark side. Though the card stock was on a par with that of the competition, the included envelopes were very thin and see-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 lets you preview each design with your image, and it’s a snap to add in a QR code (which could be a cute way to also share a family blog or online photo gallery). With this service, it’s easy enough to manipulate design elements and edit photos, and verso printing is included. Vistaprint doesn’t offer recipient address printing or a mailing service.

You get what you pay for with Walmart’s same-day holiday photo cards. It was the least expensive of any service we tested, and our final results—printed on thin, single-sided, semi-gloss photo paper—reflected the 75¢-per-card price point. That said, our experience designing our cards was smooth, and our cards were ready quickly. Beware Walmart’s linen paper option: We tried it first, and the resulting prints came out dark and oversaturated on heavily textured paper that wasn’t flattering for portraits. The photo paper results look cheap, but the actual print quality was good, with accurate skin tones.

Our experience using Walgreens for same-day holiday cards was better in 2022 than in previous years. Though the final print was a bit more muted compared with our top pick, the site is easy to navigate, with lots of cute designs to choose from and more photo-editing tools than Staples offers. We stuck with Staples as our top same-day pick because it delivered a better product for less. But if Walgreens is just a block from your house and Staples is across town, it might be worth a gander.

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.

Before testing, we weeded out 16 additional holiday photo-card services because they didn’t meet our basic criteria: Printique, Amazon Prints, CardsDirect, Cardstore, Collage.com, MOO, Mpix, Paper Source, Picaboo, UPrinting, York Photo, Target, Etsy, Magnetstreet, and Zazzle.

This article was edited by Phil Ryan and Erica Ogg.