Put Your Pictures in Video Greeting Cards With JibJab.com

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You can now create animated movies with your own photographs using the site JibJab.com. The card above is free and allows you to import five different photos into the animated snowball fight. You can upload your own faces, or pick from the list of famous faces that Jibjab supplies. Other cards have a small charge based on credits you purchase. The results are hilarious.

I inserted my face along with the famous people above. The faces of Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey came from the photos provided by Jibjab. I uploaded the Albert Einstein and Halle Berry images and cut out their faces.

The website is easy to use, allowing users to upload photographs and isolate faces using a services of movable dots. Once uploaded, the faces can be inserted into the card of your choice. You may recall Jibjab is the site that creates those funny political animated videos are all over the media. Here's a review of the e-cards that appeared in the Seattle Times.

You can feel comfortable uploading your photos to Jibjab. Jibjab is a licensee of the the TRUSTe program, an organization that reviews the privacy policy of companies to make sure it is consistent with government and industry guidelines concerning the use of your personal information.

Happy New Year!

Make Your Own Holiday Cards from Stock Photos

Are you looking for a way to personalize a card with images of your family? Check out this tutorial from GraphicReporter.com blog written by Lesa Snider King. She’s a stock photographer and chief evangelist for iStockphoto. Her personal mission is to teach the world to create—and use—better graphics. I had the pleasure of meeting her this past year when she spoke to the Cleveland Digital Publishing Users Group.

Her directions feature photos from iStockphoto, a wonderful service that provides a large variety of photos at economical prices. In addition to these photos, you can use those that are available for free legally through a Creative Commons License on sites such as Flickr.

These techniques can be used for greeting cards of any kind.

Create Online Photo Greeting Cards using Flickr

Flickr user acfou has created an online application that allows you to search for a photo that is licensed for open use, and to post that picture on a website with a greeting. The link above has examples of photos he or she has created.

Here is a link to the picture above. I created it by searching for the keyword "smile." I was then able to look at a bunch of thumbnail pictures and then drag the image I wanted into the site. Then I created the text and the site gave me a link which could be pasted into Flickr. The site is called phreetings.com, a combination of "phrase" and "greetings."