From the course: Mobile Photography Weekly

Send a photo card from your phone - iPhone Tutorial

From the course: Mobile Photography Weekly

Send a photo card from your phone

- Hi, I'm Sean Duggan, and this week on Mobile Photography Weekly we're going to take a look at one of the ways that you can liberate the photos from the pixels that are stored on your phone and turn them into cool photo cards that you can send to other people. And all of this takes place right on your phone. You don't even have to get off onto your computer. So as is often the case with products or services that you can order through your phone, there are a number of apps that offer this functionality. We're going to take a look at three of them really quick, and we're going to start with an app called Touchnote. Touchnote is available for both Android and iOS. It's a real simple app here. And when you first come into it, if you swipe to the side, you'll see that there are other products that you can order as well. We're just going to concentrate on postcards. If I come in here and tap postcard, I can choose a photo to use. I'm just going to choose one of these pictures that I took the other day. And then I can also change the layout if I want to. So you can have more of a collage layout if you want to have multiple pictures in there. You can have this with no border. I think I'll leave that there, set to no border. And then, you go in and this is an interface that allows you to add the address of the recipient and add your message if you want, really nice cards. They're approximately four by six in size, glossy cardstock, cost about $1.99, $1.95. As with a lot of these services, you purchase credits, and the more credits you purchase, the cost per card comes down if you buy a lot of credits. So let's move into the next app. We'll take a look at this. This is called Ink Cards. And the cool thing about Ink Cards is that you can order normal postcards but you can also kind of upgrade to a premium card and it is delivered in an embossed envelope. You have a variety of different design themes you can choose from here. And when you go into these design themes, there are a number of very professionally-designed themes where you can add your own photo to the theme, and you can even customize some of the text. So for instance, in this shot here, I added my own photo that I took on a vacation to San Diego. And I was able to customize the location where it says "Greetings from San Diego!" The premium card on this one was upgraded to a price of about just under six dollars. Now the next one that I like to use a lot, it's actually become one of my favorites, for iOS only, it's called PhotoCard by Bill Atkinson. Now Bill Atkinson was one of the original software designers for the original Mackintosh computer, but he's also a very well-known and highly-regarded nature photographer. So with PhotoCard, these are much larger cards. They're approximately five-and-a-half by eight inches. They come with a laminated glossy cover, really sturdy, really beautiful cards. You can choose to use your own photo or you can also use a number of one of Bill Atkinson's very beautiful nature photos. So another cool thing I like about this is that there's the ability to add stickers if you want to. So if you tap here, there's a number of fun stickers you can add to kind of liven up your message. These can be added to the back of the card where you have your written text or to the front of the card as well. You can also design your own stickers. Now, these cost one credit each, but you can design your own stickers. So that's pretty cool. Now, the other nice thing is that you can also choose stamps. So, one of the things that I like about this is that the stamp area looks like an actual stamp with a photograph on it, and it just kind of makes the card more pleasing to look at. Some of the other services, it just kind of has a real generic postal mark and it's not something nice like these stamps. So you can choose from a lot of different stamp designs here, something that maybe fits the theme of the card that you're writing or the place that you have visited. Or, as with the stickers, you can also make a custom stamp from one of your own photos if you want as well. So for instance, I'll just choose this stamp here of the Golden Gate Bridge, and you can see how that drops that in there just like that. You know, photography is one of the main things that I do with my smartphone. And the ability to create these cool photo cards and send to family and friends when I'm on the road or even just for fun when I'm not on the road is another way that I can not only enjoy my photography but also share it with others.

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