The Best Holiday Photo Card Services for 2024

You likely associate Hallmark with greeting cards more than any other brand, and the revered company now lets you order personalized holiday cards that feature your photos. You get a choice of 185 designs, but a starting price of $2.49 per flat card for a quantity of 25 means it’s not the most affordable option. The minimum order size is five cards (which brings the price to $2.99 per card). A Hallmark+ membership (which includes the company’s video streaming service) gets you a 30% discount. 

The service’s step-by-step customization interface is clear, but you don’t have a lot of freedom to move or resize elements of the design. You do at least get a generous choice of fonts and colors for the text you can add to some areas of a card. Ultimately, the interface is sufficient if you simply want to create a professional design without a lot of tinkering. Return address printing is free. Thankfully, Hallmark’s card designer accepts HEIC/HEIF image files, a format that most recent smartphones use to minimize image sizes. 

My test cards arrived in a hard envelope. They use quality cardstock and show good color saturation, though the printing wasn’t quite as sharp as that of some other services. Hallmark includes medallion-like stickers with its logo for sealing the envelopes—a nice touch. 

The company doesn’t sell ornaments or other objects with your photos, unlike most other entries here. 

Lowest price per card for an order of 25: $2.49 
Offers other personalized, non-paper gifts: No 

Mixbook sells fine greeting cards in addition to photo books. Its card designs are stylish, and the website’s interface is intuitive and flexible. A set of 25 5-by-7-inch flat cards on a Satin Finish costs a competitive $1.66 per card. The price per card goes down as you increase the quantity and up as you improve the cardstock quality. Options for the latter include (in order of ascending price) Signature Matte, Premium Matte, Pearl Finish, Cotton Texture, or Luxe Board options. If you pull out all the stops for an order of 20 foil cards using the top cardstock, you pay $4.87 per card. The service includes blank envelopes, though it costs 25 cents per card to print addresses on them. There’s no minimum order. 

According to Mixbook, the company “uses only the highest-quality, heavy-weight papers that are ethically sourced from sustainable forests and certified by the Forest Stewardship Council and the Rainforest Alliance.” I was also happy to see that Mixbook accepts HEIC/HEIF file formats. You get good control over text font and placement and can even start with a blank canvas if you prefer.  

My test cards arrived with excellent protection in a hard shipping envelope. Their cardstock quality is good, and images look acceptably sharp, though colors appear slightly washed out. A Mixbook logo is prominent on the cards.  

The service offers six-day shipping for free, but you can upgrade to Priority or Express if you’re in a rush. It won’t mail the cards for you. 

Lowest price per card for an order of 25: $1.66 
Offers other personalized, non-paper gifts: Limited 

Other services here offer recycled cardstock options, but Paper Culture uses only recycled or non-wood materials. The company even plants a tree and offsets the carbon footprint for every order, making it the most environmentally friendly service here. 

Paper Culture’s card designs are more innovative than competitors’, which tend toward traditional styles. You can also create custom cards with free assistance from the company’s professional design services. Paper Culture offers more card sizes and shapes than most others—including a circular format. The interface is clear, letting you add photos from your device and various cloud storage providers. To keep card designs consistent, Paper Culture has you fill in text to the side of the interface rather than on a preview of the card itself.  

Unfortunately, the site doesn’t support the HEIC/HEIF file format, and you can’t resize or move boxes or change fonts for a design. You can upload a completely custom design as an image file if you want to start from scratch. 

You pay a bit more for all that goodwill compared with others, though the price goes down for larger quantities. The minimum order is 10 cards, and 5-by-7 cards go for $2.94 each in a set of 20. A foil printing choice raises the price to $3.14 per card. Return address printing costs 39 cents per envelope. When your order is complete, you can dedicate your planted tree and send an e-card to a recipient of your choice. 

My test cards arrived early in a sturdy cardboard box. The print quality is excellent. In addition to cards, Paper Culture offers calendars, photo books, and posters, but no non-paper gifts.

Lowest price per card for an order of 25: $2.94 
Offers other personalized, non-paper gifts: No

Postable’s tagline is “Really nice cards, mailed for you.” It’s not the only service that can make those claims, but it does live up to them with a wide selection of beautiful styles. You can add your photos to many of the designs or choose from greeting cards that don’t need an image. The service’s interface is clear and fast, with decent customization options. A choice of handwriting fonts almost makes up for not being able to write directly on the cards yourself, especially since they resize automatically to fit an allotted space. 

Prices are higher than for other services because they involve custom-printed text, envelope printing, mail drop-off, and postage. You can either enter addresses individually, have the service request your friends’ addresses via a link, or upload a spreadsheet of them. 

If you’d rather mail the cards yourself, you can do so. A single 5-by-7-inch folded card costs $4.59, which drops to $3.49 for a postcard ($2.93 for more than 19). Removing the Postable logo from the back costs 20 cents per card. If you want to receive the cards yourself, shipping starts at $4.99. 

The test cards have among the best photo and text printing quality of any service I tested. A large designer credit and branding are on the back. Packaging is more than adequate. 

Lowest price per card for an order of 20: $3.98
Offers other personalized, non-paper gifts: No 

Shutterfly prints your photos on a wide and attractive selection of holiday cards. It has good filtering tools to help you zero in on the options you want. Prices are about average, with 5-by-7-inch flat cards starting at $2.19 each for a quantity of 25. There’s no minimum order, and the per-card price isn’t any different for even a single card. You also pay less for orders of over 50 cards. You can get 5-by-7s flat or folded, and 6-by-8 flat cards. Premium options include foil printing, gatefold and trifold cards, and several choices of cardstock. The priciest option costs $5.57 for a glitter-adorned card on Luxe Double-Thick cardstock. 

The card design interface has you enter your family name and all the family members in your photo before you even start, so there’s no chance of having the placeholder family name appear on your cards by mistake. When you add a photo (which you can grab from Amazon Photos, Facebook, Google Photos, Instagram, or your hard drive), you get effect choices including B&W, Saturate, and Soft Focus. But you don’t have much leeway in moving images and elements around, as you can with Mixbook or Zazzle. Envelope choices include five colors (mostly shades of gray along with red) and a holiday-patterned liner. Return address printing costs 42 cents per envelope, and you get a good selection of fonts. Shutterfly’s Mail-for-Me service is similar to Postable’s and costs 99 cents per card.

My test cards arrived in the same orange cardboard envelope as other Shutterfly printing orders. The cards have sharp, well-saturated photos and use pleasantly stiff cardstock. 

Shutterfly also offers a wealth of products on which you can print your photos, including blankets, candles, drinkware, magnets, pillows, puzzles, and even socks. You may run across another card-printing site called tinyprints, but Shutterfly owns it and provides all the same options.  

Lowest price per card for an order of 25:  $2.19
Offers other personalized, non-paper gifts: Yes 

Simply to Impress provides a large selection of holiday card templates at very reasonable rates. You can order as few as 15 4-by-5.5-inch cards for $2.14 each (usually discounted). The per-card price drops to $1.66 for an order of 25 and to $1.34 for 100. For 5-by-7s, the prices are $2.06 per card for a set of 25, $1.88 per card for 50, and $1.66 per card for a quantity of 100. With Simply to Impress, you pay more for premium cardstock (required if you want folding cards), bumping the entry price up to $2.35 per card for 15. Adding raised foil printing brings the price to $3.54 per card. The final cards are impressive in their sharp photo printing quality (though text printing is less crisp), and they arrived in a sturdy and cheerful green cardboard envelope. 

Simply to Impress gives you a wide selection of card shapes, but I wish you could sort them by popularity or price. The design interface for adding photos is simple and does just about everything you need. The backs of cards can show another photo, text, or shape. The site helpfully warns you if you forget to replace the sample family name with your own or if you use the same photo twice. It’s disappointing that you can’t add printed text to the inside of folded cards, and you can’t change the card format after you start designing.

The company can print your return addresses and the recipient’s address on the envelopes. A new choice is RealScript, in which the printing mimics your handwriting. For 66 cents per card, the company will even stamp and mail the cards for you. Simply to Impress no longer offers Peel & Seal envelopes, however. Free shipping makes this service even more impressive, as it even applies to orders as low as 15 cards. Just keep in mind that a coupon code might prevent you from getting that perk.

After you submit your design, professionals at Simply to Impress check and correct your photos’ brightness and contrast, along with the alignment of text. For $25, designers will retouch your pictures and make other improvements—a great service for non-designers.

Beyond cards, Simply to Impress sells ornaments, journals, self-inking stamps, and stockings, but surprisingly no calendars or mugs.

Lowest price per card for an order of 25: $1.66
Offers other personalized, non-paper gifts: Yes

If you need holiday cards now, Walgreens is the way to go. It’s the best custom greeting card service for local pickup. The company sells 5-by-7 folded cards printed on standard cardstock starting at $2.49 each for orders of 20 or more, while flat cards of the same dimensions cost $1.99 each. The same printed on glossy or matte photo paper cost $1.49 each.  

The card designs are fun and varied but not as elegant as what you get from Paper Culture. You can upload your photos in the modern HEIC/HEIF format. The design interface gives you decent control over photo placement and sizing, but you can’t resize text boxes. Font choices for text are good, with many script typefaces. Like most other custom greeting card services, Walgreens Holiday Photo Cards warns you if you leave in any dummy text.

Walgreens can even mail your greeting cards for you, starting at $4.99 for orders of less than 21 flat 5-by-7 cards; over that amount, the price decreases to $4.49 each. Raised foil cards cost $3.39 each for a set of 20.  

The print quality of the cards I picked up at my local Walgreens is satisfactory but not as good as that of most of the mail-order services; I noticed stray ink on some white areas. The cardstock is thinner than most.  

CVS offers a very similar service, so it could be your same-day choice if you don’t have a local Walgreens. But I found navigating its site tougher, and it doesn’t offer Mail-for-Me like Walgreens. 

Lowest price per card for an order of 25: $1.49 
Offers other personalized, non-paper gifts: Yes 

Walmart Photo is the most value-oriented place to get custom photo holiday cards. You can take advantage of same-day pickup at your local megastore for many greeting card styles, and one-hour pickup for a few. Print quality is surprisingly good. The card design selection isn’t all that elegant or artistic, and the interface for designing cards is adequate but not class-leading. Unfortunately, the service doesn’t support HEIC/HEIF image files. 

Walmart still charges as low as 50 cents per card, though that’s only for prints on photo paper. Real cards start at a still very reasonable 66 cents—even for a single card. You can choose flat cards in 4-by-8 and 5-by-7 sizes, as well as 5-by-7 folded cards ($1.42 per card). It doesn’t offer a large design selection for the latter, but flat cards can be in “elegant,” rounded, scalloped, or square shapes. Cardstock choices are glossy photo paper, matte photo paper, or premium cardstock. 

Printing your return address on envelopes is free, but doing so means you won’t get same-day store pickup. There’s no option to print the recipients’ addresses, as you can with several other services here. Shipping for my test order of 20 cards cost just $6.99 and is free for orders over $35. As such, Walmart is one of the most affordable options.  

The printing clarity of both the text and images on the cards is among the best of the services I tested. The folded cards arrived as a flat creased sheet, but it’s hardly hard labor to fold and stuff them into envelopes. 

Walmart has a huge selection of gifts that you can put your photos on aside from cards—blankets, calendars, key chains, mugs, phone cases, pet bowls, pillows, placemats, T-shirts (including for dogs), and even yoga mats. As you might expect, these items are not available for same-day pickup, but you can get home delivery in three to six days. 

Lowest price per card for an order of 25: 50 cents 
Offers other personalized, non-paper gifts: Yes

Zazzle’s selection of card styles isn’t impressively large, but its prices and print quality are among the best. You can start your card design from a blank canvas or use a predesigned layout from one of the site’s community of designers. You can order a single card, though some styles have a 10-card minimum.  

Flat 5-by-7-inch and 4-by-8-inch cards cost $1.48 each for a quantity of 25. If you want to get fancy, you can pay $5.95 for custom foil printing (gold, rose gold, or silver). Removing the Zazzle logo from the backs of cards costs 30 cents each. Shipping starts at $6.96, though you get free shipping on all your Zazzle orders for an annual membership of $19.95. 

You have two choices for personalizing your card. The first has you replace elements in a template, and the second (called the Design Tool) is a fully customizable interface that lets you resize and rearrange everything to taste. It’s almost a mini-Photoshop. You can manipulate colors, design elements, and fonts of the template with layers. You get a huge selection of fonts—more than any other service here.  

If you need help getting your photos from your phone to the site, you can scan a QR code that lets you upload them easily. Zazzle supports a full choice of file formats: BMP, HEIC/HEIF, JPG, PNG, TIFF, and WebP, though you can upload only one image at a time. 

Zazzle’s print quality is second to none. Although the shipment arrived a little late, I appreciated the thick cardboard envelope the company used for protection. The company offers a multiplicity of gifts, too.

Lowest price per card for an order of 25: $1.48 
Offers other personalized, non-paper gifts: Yes