Postcards are making a comeback, and not in spite of technology as you might imagine, but precisely because mobile apps like Spain’s Correos eCard have made it ridiculously easy to create a one-off, custom postcard from a photo on your phone and send it to a real mailbox anywhere in the world.
There’s always been something human about the printed postcard, the way it can transfer affection across the miles that none of the current crop of photo sharing apps, websites, and social networks like Facebook can. No doubt social media has made our lives easier by allowing us to instantly share memories with friends and family abroad, but they’ve also made those memories cheap, impersonal, and fleeting. A custom postcard, on the other hand, is a meaningful and intimate keepsake that won’t get buried in a barrage of BuzzFeed links.
Postcards from the EDGE, 3G, and Wi-Fi
I’ve tried the Correos eCard app a few times and have been pleasantly surprised by its ease of use and the efficiency of the Spanish postal service. Once you’ve downloaded and launched the free app (Android and iOS), you simply add a photo from your phone or cloud storage like Dropbox to the front of the postcard, write your message and the recipient’s address on the back, and pay using credit card or PayPal (1.50 euros within Spain, 2.50 euros to Europe or Greenland, and 2.75 euros everywhere else). The printing and delivery of the postcard is handled by Correos, so you don’t even have to set foot in a post office.
The whole process took me about five minutes and the bulk of that time was spent composing my überthoughtful message. Keep in mind that it might take a bit longer if you’re doing this over a 3G connection (do this over Wi-Fi if you’re on a cheapo data plan), as the photo needs to be uploaded to Correos. My first postcard reached its surprised and elated destinatario in Singapore in just seven days.
A simple design and experience
At just one megabyte, the Correos eCard app is pretty barebones. There aren’t any templates to choose from like with other competing apps such as TouchNote or Postcard®, but that’s a good thing in my opinion. I’m not interested in cookie cutter designs or prefab sentiments. I want my photo to tell one part of the story and to have the backside tell another part in words.
The app’s backside design is what you might expect: a simple white space for a message on the left and the recipient’s address on the right. There’s not a lot of choice when it comes to fonts — a measly four, rather unattractive fonts with adjustable sizes — but again, this isn’t too much of an issue for me, as I’m not interested in faking a handwritten note. Times New Roman will suffice. The recipient’s address area is limited to one size and one font, but again, a minor gripe that I expect will be addressed in a future update. What I do like is the ample space the message area has; at the smallest font size available, I squeezed in about five hundred characters. (TouchNote, for example, limits you to a mere 220 characters and one font size.)
Probably the largest plus of using the Correos eCard app is the neatly displayed Correos logo on the reverse. After all, isn’t part of the allure of receiving a postcard the knowledge that it travelled from Spain? Other apps just can’t beat Correos here. Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from using a similar postcard app based in the recipient’s country and having the postcard delivered the next business day, but that cheats both you and the addressee out of the complete postcard experience. Being a part of Generation X, I didn’t grow up having everything instantly delivered or open twenty-four hours, so as a sender, I quite enjoy the delayed gratification from an appreciative friend or relative several days later.
My biggest complaint about the Correos eCard app so far? There is no email or SMS notification when the postcard is sent, unlike Singapore’s Singpost Post-a-Card app, which sends both an order confirmation as well as an email alert when the postcard has been printed, stamped, and sent. The only notification you get from the Correos eCard experience is the automated PayPal receipt from Weego Software, the app’s billing solution provider, and that’s only if you choose to pay via PayPal. This can be disconcerting to the first-time user because the only time you’ll get proof of delivery is when the addressee thanks you.
Travel hack, keep a habit, or decorate your piso with postcards
We all know that a custom postcard makes for a worthy gift experience, but you can also use the Correos eCard app to keep track of your travels throughout Spain. That’s right, go ahead and send postcards to yourself! Take a selfie standing in front of the windmills of Consuegra, enjoying a free tapa by the Alhambra, or in one of the arcs of Segovia’s aqueduct; launch the Correos eCard app and jot down some of those magical details that you don’t want to forget on the backside. Send it and maybe race the card back home to your piso in Madrid. Now you’ve got yourself a pretty cool travel journal of sorts.
You could also use the app as a fun way to start or keep up a photography or creative writing habit. Part of the problem with digital photography is that it’s not only easy to amass thousands of photos that never leave your device’s storage, it’s also easy to get lazy or complacent about shooting at all. Why not commit to sending yourself one postcard a month to stay motivated? Practice depth of field, framing, or composing at different times of the day and document the trial and error in your message. Try your hand at street photography accompanied by an invented narrative on the back or have a go at night photography with an anecdote about Madrid’s late sundown in the summer. Whatever gets you out there shooting and writing with a purpose.
You can even decorate your flat with all those postcards you’ve sent yourself. Hang the cards on a clothesline or create a curtain out of them, arrange them in a shape on the wall above your bed with tape, group them together and put the finished product in an IKEA frame, pin them on a corkboard, or just stick them on your fridge with magnets. Displaying your postcards will definitely make your rental feel a lot warmer.
Follow Erica Chan’s board Creative Display of Postcards on Pinterest.
Getting the best image for your postcard
In general, the higher the resolution of the image, the higher the quality of the printed postcard. You’d need at least a 1280 pixel x 960 pixel image according to the photo pros at B&H to print a postcard from eCorreos at photo quality, but I really wouldn’t settle for anything less than 1800 pixels x 1200 pixels. Every smartphone released within the past few years should be able to shoot at these pixel dimensions, so I wouldn’t be too concerned about that. If you have doubts, you should be able to check the details of the image using a file manager app or a good image gallery app. (I use QuickPic for Android.)
I like to think I’m a pretty good shot and that my photo can stand on its own but I do use Snapseed (free, Android and iOS) for some basic editing like straightening, cropping, sharpening, adding some contrast, and increasing the saturation. This is pretty much the same thing I do to my DSLR shots in Photoshop on my powerful desktop, but Snapseed is more than capable on my phone. Then I simply use the retouched photo in the Correos eCard app.
If you want to do something like overlay text or use a preset filter, you can use an app like PicsArt (free, Android and iOS), then use that edited image in the Correos eCard app. (Disclaimer: I have not attempted printing an actual postcard from a PicsArt-edited image. I’ve just done a few tests on images shot on my smartphone’s 8MP camera to see if the resulting file meets the minimum pixel dimensions standard for quality printing. Your mileage may vary.)
Both Snapseed and PicsArt shrink the file size down quite a bit, but unlike the myriad other photo editing apps, they still output an image suitable for printing. You should also be aware that any editing in either PicsArt or Snapseed might crash the app if your phone is a low-end or even mid-range device with limited processing power. Processing images taxes the CPU, so that’s not the app’s fault. My advice then is this: keep it simple. And for the love of photography and all that is good about technology, do not combine PicsArt and Snapseed. That’s way too much pixel destruction going on. Pick one photo editing app.
Don’t let your best photos live on your homescreen or die in an avalanche of social network ephemera. Send a postcard. The Correos eCard app makes it easy to share sincere one-to-one experiences at a time when we’re all so used to indiscriminately broadcasting photos of our feet. The only downside might be sounding like a Luddite when you have to clarify mailing address, not email address, as you update your contacts.
Use your own photos to create, print, and send real postcards from Spain with the Correos eCard app appeared first on ¡Vaya Madrid!
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