I travel a lot and I'm a photographer so I'm always shooting everywhere I travel too. As I'm going through the airport and shops I sometimes take time to look at the postcards on display to get ideas of things I might want to shoot while I'm there. It's rare that I'll actually buy a postcard with the intent to fill it out and mail it. I have done it in the past and in most cases I usually beat the postcard home and could simply mail the person a photo or send them one via email.
HazelMail take the pain out of sending postcards
However, if there were an App that let me choose one of my own photos, lay it out, compose a message and upload it and that card would be physically printed and mailed, well I'm all over that! That's exactly what HazelMail allows you to do. My colleague Jill was telling me about it and at first as she started I assumed it was a simple upload/email service, but when she said a "physical" postcard gets mailed she got my attention. So I downloaded it on the spot. The way it works is that the App is FREE. You're paying for the actual cards you (they) send out for you. The photos can either be photos you've taken with your iPhone or ones in your library. You'll get to compose your message using a variety of fonts. The cost of sending a single card (front and back) is $1.50. You fund your account with a credit card or PayPal. As an added plus you can enter your Delta Skymiles account number in your profile and earn bonus miles for every postcard you send (it's the circle of life or travel)
The App works great! My only issue is that while you can rotate and choose a background color for your photos, there is no proportional zoom. The zoom that's in the app will fill the card, but it will stretch your photo to do so. For me that's unacceptable. So I'll have to use a background color for the photos that don't match the exact proportions of a postcard. The iPhone shots seem to almost fill the card, where as the ones from my DSLR do leave a little more white space.
With that said come back tomorrow for a review of a similar app called Postino.
HazelMail
HazelMail allows you to turn YOUR photos into PostCards and have them mailed to your friends and family directly from your iPhone or iPod touch.
- HazelMail
- Get on App Store
- Free
All info was collected on 9th March, 2010 when the app was reviewed.
About Terry White
Terry is the co-author of The Best Selling "The iPhone Book" 1st, 2nd and 3rd editions. He has been active in the industry for over 25 years and is the founder and president of MacGroup-Detroit, Inc., Michigan's largest Macintosh Users Group, host of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast and a technology writer - Terry White Tech Blog.
Thanks Terry this sounds great. one question from lazy me. with this app do you need to type in each address or will it copy from your address book with a click? thanks for all you do for all of us!
It will use your contacts for addresses.