I take thousands of photographs when I tour by bicycle. I select a few of them to include in my trip journals and the rest sit unused on my computer's hard drive. Up to now, that has been the end of the line for them.

Recently, a friend of mine showed me some note cards she had had printed that had one of her photographs on it. After seeing these nicely printed, customized cards, I wondered if I might do this with my own photos?

Pick a Card, Any Card

The idea of creating note cards from my own photos intrigued me. Not only would they make great thank you notes to send to the people who host me on my travels, these cards would make personalized gifts to friends for birthdays and Christmas.

There are dozens of website offering to print photos. I started looking through them and came upon Vistaprint.com. They print all kinds of customized things, from business cards to mouse pads to note cards to calendars and more.

Their prices for folded note cards (not postcards) start at an order of 10 and get cheaper as the quantity goes up. For 10 cards with the same photo, Vistaprint charges $8.00 (plus tax and shipping), cheaper than buying them in a store! I thought I'd give it a try.

You Outta Be In Pictures

Before paying for dozens of cards, I decided to do a test run of a single card. I hunted around the Vistaprint.com website until I found the page of note card templates. One option was to create my own design.

My first decision was which photo to use as my test subject. I have many images that I really like and I picked one to upload. But, I soon discovered that resolution was important. The photo I chose, an older one, didn't have enough data detail to make a good image. I was warned of this by Vistaprint when I uploaded the photo.

It appears that for the size of card I was designing, the minimum photo size is 1 Megabyte. This was unfortunate, as many of my photos come from several years back when digital cameras didn't have enough storage to hold lots of large photos. But, for the past several years, the cameras I've used easily store thousands of megabyte sized images and I still had thousands to choose from.

For the test, I picked a recent photo of the Loferbach river in Austria.

I figured this picture was similar to kinds of the photos I would choose for printing, so it would be a good test.

Cutting the Cards

Once I selected an image, I had to upload it to the Vistaprint.com page and then decide what to put on the rest of the card. My options involved selecting what I wanted on the inside and back of the card, if anything. I also had to choose a border.

Since this was the first time doing this, it took me a bit of clicking and looking and clicking again to finish the card's design. After about 20 minutes, I had what I wanted. As you might imagine, there were plenty of add-ons. For another $2, I opted for a glossy finish. Adding tax (in California) and delivery, the total for 10 of these cards was $18.43 or $1.84 per card. All in all, cheap as store bought note cards go!

I ordered the cards on October 18. Three days later, my order was shipped and I got them (through the mail) about a week later. In addition to the cards, I got 10 fitted white envelopes. I was pleased with the quick turnaround.

Putting My Cards on the Table

The cards came in a pack.

The cards themselves are flat. Here is how the card turned out.

I was really pleased with the quality of the image on the card. At 5.5 by 4 inches, they seem a bit small, but that is only by store-bought standards.

Now that I knew what I would get and how to design them, I decided to print up 11 more cards, giving a dozen different images. My plan is to assemble them into 6 card sets as Christmas presents, leaving me a couple dozen for my own purposes.

Playing My Cards Right

Selecting 11 images from the thousands of Megabyte or more sized photographs was no easy task. First, I had to find them all! I spent hours combing through my computer's directories and then slowly hunted through them for stunning images.

My first cut got down to about 60 photos. I decided I would only use horizontal pictures, which eliminated about 10. Then, I spent much more time honing my selections down to about 20. I asked my wife to pick her favorite 11.

Here are the photos I chose (these are big files and may take a while to load):

I had signed up for emails from Vistaprint figuring I'd get some discount offers. I get them daily. When I got one for 50% off, I processed the order for the 11 images above.

It took more than an hour to upload each picture, type and position the text for each card, order them individually, and actually send my order to be printed. Due to the discount, this order of 110 cards came to a total of $83.85 or about 76 cents a piece. In the end, I spent just over $100 for 12 dozen personalized note cards.

These cards arrived in about the same time frame as before and with the same impressive quality. I am excited to have them and look forward to both giving them as gifts and sending them as notes.

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