Travel App review no.2: SnapShot Postcard
This is part of an occasional series in which I review handy apps for the smartphone wielding traveller. Today I review the SnapShot Postcard app.
Remember back in the good old days, when people went away on holidays and the next you heard from them was a postcard in the mail weeks later? Nowadays, we can follow along as our friends and family visit exotic locations. An Instagram pic from the airport lounge before they’ve even boarded. Facebook status updates about the size of the hotel room. YouTube video of them whitewater rafting or bungy jumping.
I love to travel vicariously in real time on other people’s adventures. And I love to take people along with me when I travel, by posting daily photo updates on Instagram or Facebook.
However, call me old-fashioned, I still like to both send and receive real, snail mail postcards – the type you can stick on the fridge with some magnets and gaze longingly at every time you open the door for milk. (It’s yet another way to contribute to Stage 3 of the travel happiness.)
Over the years, I’ve amassed quite a collection of postcards. Literally, hundreds of them. But my collection is now growing at a much slower rate. Hardly anyone sends actual postcards anymore. You have to buy them for a start, then write and address them, plus buy some local stamps and find a postbox or post office. In some countries that all seems too much of a hassle.
So I was thrilled to discover the SnapShot Postcard app. It is fabulous. Take a pic on your smartphone, add captions to the photo (if you like), type up the message on the back of the postcard and then you just select a recipient from your contact list, press send and within a few days, there will be an actual, real-life printed postcard in their mailbox – ready for them to stick on their fridge.
You pay for the printing and postage via credits you’ve already uploaded onto the app – depending on how many credits you buy at a time, a postcard mailed back to Australia costs between US$1.60 and $4 (and half that to a US address).
There’s a variety of fonts to choose from, so you can imitate the handwritten effect when writing your message. And what I usually do is edit the text I’ve used on the previous postcard I sent so that everyone receives an individual personalised message, but without retyping the same basic information each time. And the same for the caption on the front of the postcard – you can go old-school and add something like “Greetings from Mongolia”. Or add something more targeted and personal, like “Don’t ya wish you were here, suckers?” Sometimes I add a caption, sometimes I leave the photo to speak for itself.
The photo on the front can be scaled or tilted, and borders added if desired (I don’t add a border. I like the simple full frame photo look). The best part is that the postcard photo is an actual view you saw, because you’ve taken the pic yourself. Or you can use photos with yourself or your travel companions in the shot which makes it a very personal postcard to your loved ones back home.
As long as you have all your family and friends’ address details in your contact list on your phone, the addressing part is simple. No need to carry around an address book. But if you don’t have them to add automatically, there is an option to ‘add a recipient’ where you type in the name and address manually.
The return address (i.e. your home address) can be entered once and is then saved for all future postcards.
In our experience, delivery times can vary. Sometimes postcards have been on our recipients’ fridges within days of sending from the app, other times its taken a couple of weeks.
SnapShot Postcard is available for both iPhone and Android.
Do you send postcards? Do you like to receive them?
This is not a sponsored post. I just really like this app and want to tell you about it. This post is linked to:
#TheWeeklyPostcard at www.travelnotesandbeyond.com
