Our Favorite Holiday Photo Card Service Makes It a Breeze to Send Season’s Greetings

I used to be a holiday-card freeloader.

Every December, I’d receive dozens of beautiful, joyous cards bursting with darling photos of toothy kids and seasonal well wishes. Each one made me very happy. And each time we received one, my wife and I would vow to make our own holiday cards the following year, to ensure we were contributing a bit of joy to others’ lives too.

But we never did. For years and years, we were positivity parasites.

I couldn’t bear the guilt—or the FOMO. So in 2022, on September 29, I emailed my wife, under this subject line: “Holiday cards—THIS IS THE YEAR!!”

I needn’t have been so all-caps DRAMATIC. Because designing and sending holiday cards with Simply to Impress was a cinch. Here’s our 2022 holiday card:

I haven’t extensively tested every major holiday photo-card service. But Wirecutter’s expert journalists have, and Simply to Impress has been our top pick since 2016.

I can see why. Simply to Impress is extremely easy to use, effective, and affordable.

The seemingly infinite selection of designs isn’t overwhelming, thanks to straightforward and helpful filters. As part of my 2023 testing, I filtered holiday-card templates for landscape orientation and designs with three-plus photos. That narrowed me down to 237 results, which were very easy to breeze through thumbnails of to find the design that most spoke to me.

Once you find a design, customization is easy. Drag and drop photos from your computer into each of the template’s photo slots. From there, simple controls make it easy to zoom, brighten, move, or otherwise perfect each photo.

Customizing the text for your family’s name and message is also straightforward. Just click into the existing text box, and then replace the templated words with your own.

Once I’d identified a few potential templates and set aside some photos, each of these holiday cards took me less than five leisurely minutes to make.

One of our biggest mental obstacles to sending holiday cards was gathering addresses; stuffing, addressing, sealing, and stamping more than 100 envelopes by hand; and then physically mailing them all. Holiday cheer couldn’t possibly be worth all of this hassle!

No holiday photo-card service can spare you having to gather the addresses of your friends and family. And, look, it’s kind of a pain the first time you gather them. (Do I have a 101-message Gmail thread with the subject line “Please send us your address!” Why, yes, I do.)

But after you gather the addresses, Simply to Impress once again makes things simple.

You pick your cardstock and envelope style, and then you have the option of getting recipient addresses (plus your return address) pre-printed on the envelopes. I strongly recommend doing this.

Importing your addresses is easy. You can drag in a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet, or simply copy and paste as many addresses into a single entry field all in one go. In my experience, Simply to Impress does an excellent job of properly parsing and formatting each individual address.

You can then pick the “stamp and mail” option (which I also recommend), so that Simply to Impress stuffs, addresses, seals, stamps, and sends every holiday card for you.

If this makes you nervous, you can choose to have a free design review mailed to you first. You can also get your cards sent to you, if you want to be the one to physically inspect and mail them.

But I prize convenience. Last year, I had Simply to Impress directly mail 95 of our holiday cards to friends and family. I had five envelopes (that were going to be mailed internationally) addressed and sent to me so I could mail them myself at the post office. And I ordered 15 unaddressed extras for anyone I accidentally left out or whose address I hadn’t yet wrangled.

Last year, I ended up needing more than the 15 extras I originally ordered. We kept receiving holiday cards from friends or colleagues we hadn’t sent one to. Or we’d realize, “Oh, shoot, we forgot Aunt Susan!”

So on December 13 I ordered an extra 15 “emergency” cards, and I received them on December 16, just in time to send them out before Christmas. But it was a bit of a scramble. I wish I had just ordered more than I needed from the jump. It would have been worth spending an additional $20 or so on more extras at the outset to avoid the rush a few weeks later.

But the bottom line is this: Sending holiday cards with our pick is dead simple. I’m no longer a holiday-card freeloader. And I’ve learned that when it comes to holiday cards, it can feel just as good to give as it is to receive.

This article was edited by Catherine Kast and Christine Cyr Clisset.