A postcard you make yourself

Anyone who wants to send a picture from the gallery is welcome to. The trouble is that the work starts afterwards: save the picture, drop it into something, put a line of text beside it, export the lot again. Those four steps are something the site can just as well do itself.

That is why you will find a small builder under Postcard. You pick a picture from the gallery, choose one of sixty sayings to go with it, and out comes a card you can download and send. There are no more steps than that.

Four drawers for the sayings

The sixty sayings sit in four groups: adventure, friendship, funny and wisdom. The split is deliberately coarse. Sorting them more finely would probably be tidier, but then choosing turns into searching. Four drawers you can click through without losing the thread.

What goes with what is your decision. The night shot from the Christmas diorama, with Father Christmas in the sleigh and the reindeer pushing its head into the frame, takes a saying from any of the four drawers — and becomes a different picture with each one. With one from the adventure drawer it is a journey about to start. With a funny one it looks as though the reindeer has just raised an objection. That is exactly the appeal.

Why Christmas pictures of all things

For trying it out I used the album from 2023/2024, and rather more of it stuck than I had planned. Almost all of those shots were taken with the lights off, with nothing but the string of lights on the tree and the small lamps in the snow. That works well on a card: plenty of dark, a few glowing points, and enough quiet surface for the text.

Going through them, I noticed how much a new frame changes a picture. The red steam engine with the cotton-wool puff at its funnel, photographed in front of the bookshelf, always struck me as a little restless in the album. As a card, with the text underneath, it carries the whole crop.

The small print

At the bottom of every card there is a copyright line from playmofan.ch. It is not meant as a barrier — quite the opposite: sharing is expressly welcome. The line simply means that once a card has travelled through three chat groups, it is still possible to tell where the picture came from.

If a saying is missing that clearly belongs in one of the four drawers, write to me. Sixty is not a sacred number.