Postcards

Collecting on a small scale

I only just found out that World Postcard Day is celebrated annually on October 1st to honour the tradition of sending and receiving postcards. It was first observed in 2020 to mark the 150th anniversary of the postcard's existence, as the world's first postcard was officially sent on October 1, 1869, in Austria-Hungary.

Over the years I have participated in postcard exchanges, with people all over the world. I find it a great way to collect other people's work and also get a small insight to their lives.

The first time I did postcard exchanges was through photography forums, then through Elfster, which is an online gift exchange site. The group for this is know as “postcards from afar” which does exchanges once a month. I have exchanged in this group on & off for a few years. Although recently even though people are still exchanging postcards the interaction doesn't seem to be there anymore, my last few exchanges, I haven't even heard whether the postcard has arrived.

I always contact the sender of postcards to let they know it has arrived & thank them.

A selection of postcards I have sent in the past

Originally I would get my postcards printed by Moo, which were reasonably priced but I found that I would be only sending older images and if I had a new image it was too expensive just to get only one printed.

I have recently started using an app called My Postcard which allows you to design a postcard the way you want, so you can have a single image or multiple images.

The cost of using this service isn't to bad considering the costs of sending a postcard aboard these days.

A selection of postcards waiting to be sent

As for receiving postcards some still come from people I know online and I have now joined a site called Postcrossing that has over 800,000 users in 208 countries, which is a lot of postcards!

A selection of postcards I've received over the years

If anyone is interested in a postcard exchange leave a comment and I'm sure we can sort something out.