Send a photo postcard from your phone: Apps make it easy to say ‘Wish you were here’

Send your postcards with a phone app by e-mail

I have a confession. I have an immense collection of postcards that never reached their intended recipients. Lack of postage, a complete address or even motivation have turned countless scribbled postcards into nothing more than bookmarks in my guidebooks.

But now there’s no excuse. New apps make it ridiculously easy to send a photo postcard from your phone. I checked out a few of the free ones.

First up, Postcard by Concierge.com. It’s the first iPhone app from the Conde Nast travel Web site, which is worth a visit in its own right.

The application is fairly easy to use. It overlays a frame on a picture snapped with your iPhone camera. There are dozens to choose from — some kind of cheesy and others kind of classy. I liked the one that looks like an old-style air mail envelope.

Pick a frame, set up your snapshot and fire. Then you adjust the picture by magnifying or shrinking it a bit and centering it in the frame. Once you’re happy with the image, you can add a message and e-mail the postcard. If the recipient’s e-mail is in your address book, it’s a breeze to send, or you can type in an address.

The app records your GPS location as well, so recipients can see where you were when you shot it.

The app is free, but be ready to see advertisements when you create and send your postcard. Also, the e-mailed postcard comes with a link to the Concierge.com guide to the location (if one exists).

Under preferences, be sure to turn off the option to share your postcard on the Web site, unless you want everyone to be able to see it. I accidentally posted a few practice shots, including one of my dog sleeping.

But your postcards don’t have to be virtual. There are apps that will make a postcard you can hang on the fridge door or send to Grandma.

HazelMail is the first I tried. The company prints out your photo and sends it via snail mail. Of course this isn’t free. The company will mail a postcard anywhere in the world for $1.50.

You can either snap a picture with the free iPhone app or upload photos from your computer. HazelMail puts the photo on one side and prints your message on the other.

The snail-mailed postcards are especially nice to send to older relatives who might prefer something on paper showing up in a real mailbox over something in a computer inbox.

But some pages on the Web site wouldn’t open properly for me using a Mac, though they worked fine in Windows. And while HazelMail gives you 1 Hazel Buck when you open an account, it wasn’t clear what exactly that meant. (Turns out that enables you to send one postcard). You need to buy more to send any other postcards.

The final app I tried bridges the gap between virtual and real.

Postino is a free app, which will either send a real or e-mail postcard with a photo from your library or one you snap in the app. A neat feature is the option to create your own signature by freehand drawing on your iPhone screen. Postino also offers frames for your photo, many of them fairly nondescript. In preferences, you can set Postino to include your location as well.

But the e-mailed postcard shows the company Anguria Lab as the sender, so was shunted into my spam folder, while Concierge.com postcards showed my e-mail account as the sender.

However, unlike Postcard, Postino’s e-mailed image was larger and lacked the advertisements and links to Web sites. Postino is also available for Windows Mobile as well as the iPhone. You can also use it to create paper postcards (but not electronic ones) from your computer through Facebook.

To send a physical postcard, you have to buy stamps from Postino: $1.99 for one and a slightly discounted rate for greater numbers.

Of the three, I preferred Postcard. But, if you want to send either virtual or hard copy postcards, Postino is probably the best bet.