Making your own greeting cards can be lots of fun. The photo greeting card software you choose will, of course, help determine how good your greeting cards will look. This software choice will also determine whether the experience is one you enjoy and want to do again and again or whether it's a one-time project and the software is never touched again.
A good photo greeting card software package will be simple to use yet flexible enough to allow your creativity to show through. Anyone can pay
Snapfish
to create a basic photo greeting card, with the photo on the front and some verbiage inside. There's nothing at all wrong with that and they actually end up looking quite nice. However, if you want to be able to make your own photo greeting cards over and over for many different occasions, you'll want to buy your own photo greeting card software.
I'll go ahead and mention that, being the cheap computer Programmer-type that I am, I resisted buying software for this purpose for quite a while. I figured that my digital cameras each came with photo-editing software and I had other tools that would allow me to create flyers and cards. Why did I need to spend more money on specific photo greeting card software? It's true that you can actually create a half-decent greeting card with photographs in Microsoft Word. You simply set the page to landscape in the printer setup, insert a photo or two, and then spend hours working with columns, text alignment, and margins to get everything just right, printing the card in draft quality over and over again along the way. Once I did this a few times, though, I finally decided to try some software that might make it easier. Boy,was I surprised how much easier it could be!
Now, I'm a photo software "junkie" and I have different programs I use for different kinds of greeting cards. I'm not advocating that you go out and buy 3 or 4 different software packages. First, decide what kinds of greeting cards you plan to make? Christmas Cards, Birthday Cards, Birth Announcements, Thank You Notes, other occasions? Do you want to be able to make E-mail photo cards as well as printed ones? Do you want to be able to create other fun photo projects or just cards?
One of our favorite greeting card software programs is
Greeting Card Factory Deluxe
, especially if you want to print other kinds of non-photo greeting cards. If your primary focus is photo cards, try
Photo Explosion Deluxe
since photo greeting cards is the focus.
Everyone's needs are a little different, so shop around and, most importantly, read user reviews. Just make sure any greeting card software you buy has the capability of adding your own photos (some don't.)
