How to Make a Personalized Photo Card for Free
Stand out from the crowd of birthday or holiday cards on someone’s mantel with a personalized photo card. Custom cards, especially with photos, can get expensive when you order them from a graphics company. Save money by making your own personalized photo cards from home, using your computer’s Paint software. The Paint program comes installed on your system and offers the graphics and drawing functionality to make free photo cards for any occasion.
Other People Are Reading
Instructions
-
-
1
Open Paint, pull down the “File” menu and click “Open.” Browse to a folder on your computer where you have a photo stored to use for the card. Double-click the file name, which opens the image in the Paint workspace.
-
2
Click the “Select” tool, which looks like a square made of dotted lines. Draw an outline around the part of the photo to use for the card; to use the entire photo, draw an outline around the entire box. Right-click the outlined area and select “Copy.”
-
-
3
Pull down the “File” menu again and select “New.” If Paint asks to save your photo, click “No.” Pull down the “Image” menu, click “Attributes” and select your card size. For a standard-size card, type "6 inches by 4 inches" and click “OK.”
-
4
Right-click a section of the white card space and select “Paste.” Your photo pastes in; drag it into place with your cursor on the top, bottom or one side of the card.
-
5
Add a main greeting by selecting a paint color from the “Color Picker” at the bottom of the screen, clicking the “Text” tool and clicking on the white space of the card. If a text toolbar does not open, click the “View” menu and choose “Text Toolbar.” Pull down the font options and select one that goes with your card theme.
-
6
Type the card greeting, such as “Wishing your family a happy holidays from our family,” “Meet our new addition” or “We wish you were here.”
-
7
(Optional) Reduce the font size, click further down the card and add a message, such as a few lines of information about your family’s past year, birth details if your photo card is a gift thank you or announcement or just a personal message.
-
8
Click the “Paintbrush” tool, select the small round brush head and choose a new paint color. Draw a small border around the white space of the card; if your card is for the holidays, draw something seasonal such as pumpkins, hearts, shamrocks or flags. Other border options include lines, flowers, squiggles and balloons.
-
1
Tips & Warnings
Paint’s functionality is a lot less robust than other for-pay layout-and-design programs, and it can’t have more than one item open on its screen at once. This is why you open your photograph first and save it into memory before creating the card. If you started with the card, all your work would be lost when you went to open the photo. Paint still gets the job done with a couple of extra steps, your trade-off for a no-cost way to create personalized photo cards.
