Imagine taking a great photo on vacation and turning that photo into a postcard. Okay, you say, no problem — I can do that from home. But what about doing it while you’re still on vacation? What about doing it directly from your cell phone?
A new app, shoot it!, allows you to upload a photo from your phone and send it as a postcard. The downside? The app is only available for the iPhone (and iPod Touch even though, cruelly, you can’t take a photo with the Touch) and for the new BlackBerry Curve 8900, Bold and Tour. According to shoot it!, they’re working hard on expanding this list. Prices begin at $0.99 within the U.S. and rise to $1.49 to send to Western Europe. And if you’re an iPhone/Touch user, you’ll have to pay an initial additional $0.99 to buy the app from the Apple store.
Alternatively, if you don’t have a smartphone, which I don’t, you can do all this online through the U.S. Post Office at Premium Postcard. Who knew? Probably all those direct mailers, but not me. I visited my grandmother last weekend and used this service today to send her a postcard with a picture from our visit. It cost $1.25 and I know she’ll love it.
And for you letter writers, there’s Snailmailr. It costs $1 for 1-4 pages ($0.10 for each additional page) and you can include photos. They print on recycled paper and further reduce the carbon footprint of printed mail by investing in TerraPass carbon offset credits. But it’s the photo printing that charges me up. I have a decent-for-text printer that I got free with my computer, but I can’t print photos on it.
However, even the photo-printing argument didn’t convince my mother. “It must be your generation,” she said when I told her about Snailmailr. “How hard is it to put a letter in an envelope and stick on a stamp?” I had to laugh at how right she was.
That is a very cool app!
And you have two gorgeous models for your postcard example!
The older one is for sure