How to Make a Holiday Photo Card for Free (Print Sizes)

By Ismail Farooq · 30 October 2026 · 7 min read

To make a holiday photo card, put your best photos into one portrait collage, add a short greeting and a few seasonal stickers, then save it at the right size for printing or for sending by phone. With ImgVX AI that is three free tools in a row, all in your browser, with no sign-up, no upload and no watermark.

Plan the card before you start

Decide first whether the card will be printed, sent on a phone, or both. It changes the shape. A printed card has to match the paper, or the lab crops it. A card sent on WhatsApp, iMessage or Instagram looks best tall, because it fills the screen.

Photo labs aim for 300 pixels per inch, so 1500 × 2100 is the smallest a 5×7 should be. Going bigger costs nothing and gives the lab a little to spare. A 4096 px collage is only worth it for posters.

Pick and fix the photos

Three to five photos make a better card than nine. One strong group photo, used as the big picture, and two or three smaller moments from the year usually look best. Before you make the collage:

• Indoor photos with tree lights are often dark and grainy. Low Light & Dehaze lifts them, and the Noise Reducer calms the grain.
• A soft or slightly blurred favourite can be sharpened with the AI Photo Enhancer. It helps a little blur, not a badly shaken photo; the unblur article explains the limits.
• Old family photos for a "then and now" card can be fixed with the Photo Restorer and coloured with the Photo Colorizer.
• iPhone photos in HEIC open directly in every tool here. Use HEIC to JPG only if another app needs a JPEG.

The collage crops each photo to fill its cell, so keep faces near the middle of each picture. If a photo is cut badly, crop it yourself first with the Image Cropper to roughly the cell's shape.

Make the card, step by step

1. Make the collage. Open the Photo Collage Maker and select your photos in the order you want them. Hold Ctrl or Cmd in the file picker to pick several. Choose Layout One big, the rest small for a hero photo, or Grid for equal pictures. Set the Shape from the table above.
2. Leave room for the greeting. Set Spacing to about 20 and the Background to white, cream or a deep red or green. A wider gap at the edges, or a one-column layout with a blank band, gives the text somewhere to sit. You can also add a band afterwards with Canvas & Border: choose Expand the canvas, make the height a few hundred pixels taller, and set the anchor to the bottom for a band on top (or the top for a band underneath).
3. Add the greeting. Open the collage in Add Text to Image. Type something short, such as Merry Christmas from the Lees or Happy Holidays 2026. Pick the Serif font for a classic card or Casual for a playful one, anchor it top centre or bottom centre, and set the size to 6 to 9% of the width. On a busy photo, an outline width of 2 to 4 or a drop shadow keeps it readable.
4. Decorate it. In Photo Stickers, pick a snowflake, tree, gift or star. Set How many to 8 to 15 and a small size for falling snow, or a single larger sticker in a corner. Press Shuffle until the scatter misses everyone's faces.
5. Download and check it at full size. Zoom in on the text and the faces. If anything is too close to the edge, see the printing section below.

For a scrapbook look, put a Polaroid frame with a short caption, such as Lake Tahoe, July, on each photo before they go into the collage.

Printing it: edges, bleed and paper

Printers cannot always put ink exactly up to the edge of the paper, and cutting is never perfectly straight. Two rules keep the card safe:

• Keep text and faces about 1/8 inch (3 mm) in from every edge. On a 2048 px wide 5×7 that is about 50 px. Anything closer may be trimmed.
• If the print shop asks for bleed, it wants extra picture past the trim line, usually 1/8 inch on each side. Add a border of the same colour as the background with Canvas & Border, or make the collage in the shape the shop gives for the bleed size.

Most photo counters accept a JPEG. Some print services and home printers prefer a PDF; turn the card into one with Image to PDF. Some labs read the DPI written in the file to set the print size. The DPI Converter sets it to 300 without changing a single pixel.

Sending it by phone or email

For a card that only goes on phones, make the collage 1080 px wide in Portrait 4:5. That is the shape Instagram and most chat apps show without cropping. WhatsApp and Messenger shrink photos as they send them. Sending the card "as a document" or "HD" keeps it sharp.

For email, a JPEG under 1 MB opens quickly everywhere. If yours is bigger, the Image Compressor brings it down with no visible change. If you are sharing the card publicly, the Metadata Remover strips the location your phone saved inside each photo.

Ideas that work well

• The year in photos: nine photos in a 3×3 grid, one for each highlight, with the year in big type underneath.
• Then and now: two photos side by side, the same people or the same place years apart. Combine Images keeps both whole, without cropping.
• The pet card: one photo of the dog in a hat, a Polaroid frame and a caption. These get the most replies.
• New home or new baby: one big photo and two small ones. Keep the greeting short and the date in the corner.
• Thanksgiving, Hanukkah and New Year: the same steps with the turkey, menorah or fireworks sticker.

Free tool or a card website?

Card websites have ready-made templates and print in one order, which is easy if you print through them. Their editors usually need an account, upload your photos, and add a watermark or charge to download the file. Doing it here takes a few minutes longer, and you get the full-size file, free, to print anywhere or send to anyone. The photos stay on your device the whole time.

Frequently asked questions

Sources: tool options checked on the Photo Collage Maker, Add Text to Image, Photo Stickers and Photo Frames pages on 30 October 2026. Print sizes are calculated at 300 pixels per inch, the usual target for photo prints; check your print shop's own size and bleed guide before ordering.