Turn your photos into real postcards with SingPost’s new app

Singapore Post has come up with a new app that turns the photos in your Android or iOS smartphone into a physical postcard that can be mailed automatically to anywhere in the world.

Called Post-a-Card, its functionality is pretty basic. You either pick a photo from your camera roll or take a new one, slap on a template, add text, add your message and recipients, pay up, and SingPost will print and send the card for you automatically.

What about nice-to-have features such as adding filter effects to your photos or adding personalised handwriting? Not yet, said Pranay Mehra, vice president of group marketing at SingPost. It wanted to quickly get the app with basic features to market before fifty other similar apps get the same idea, he explained, adding that future updates will bring new features.

The only problem: there already are apps which provide the exact functionality of Post-a-Card and more.

Postagram, for instance, prints out your chosen Instagram photo that you can actually cut out of the postcard for keepsakes.

Postcard on the Run further personalises the postcard by letting you scribble your own signature on the phone’s touch screen. Plus, it can help you ask for the address of your friends if you don’t have them. However, the front of the postcard can only feature one photo without any sort of customisation.

And let’s not forget Apple’s own Cards app, which goes beyond postcards and helps you create nice greeting cards for your friends and family.

That said, Post-a-Card is not a bad app. The templates are nice, and SingPost has promised even more templates with the possibility of letting users upload their own templates to share. It costs S$1.90 to send a postcard to anyone in Singapore, and S$2.50 anywhere else in the world.

And the final printed postcard looks nice, if you can stand having logos of SingPost and the app stamped across the back. The front photo has a glossy finish with vivid colours. Of course, the quality of the photo itself depends on your photography skills and not the printer!

For a limited time, users get to send their first postcard for free, so Post-a-Card is definitely worth a try. But it remains to be seen whether it’ll stick around in the long run.