Postcrossing Blog

Because it’s fun to check what others have sent and received, we have created the Postcrossing gallery! It’s a section where you can shuffle through all the postcards uploaded to Postcrossing. Or, if you’re curious to discover what a certain country looks like, you can choose to browse only the postcards from that country: just select it from the list!

But, that’s not all! We have received many requests to be able to leave comments on the postcards so we’ve just finished adding that. Head over to the page of a postcard and you now have a place to leave your feedback there.

We have other things on the oven getting ready so keep coming back! And as always, we appreciate your feedback to improve the project.

So far, to see the final result of the postcards exchanges, you had to go to our Postcrossing Flickr group. Flickr is great, but wouldn’t it be awesome to match the images with the postcards and their senders and receivers?

After several weeks of work, we are proud to announce Postcrossing postcard walls! Now everybody can upload their received postcards to their respective profile! All your postcards will be displayed in your profile as well as a gallery of images that we like to call postcard walls. And we have even added a slideshow to go with it!

How does it work?

Simple. Grab your scanner or camera, get an image of the front part of the postcards you received, go to your 'Received postcards’ section and click the little icon on the right end of the row. Follow the upload instructions and voilá!

And there’s more: we have managed to copy a good amount of the postcards directly from the Flickr group to their respective profile owners so that you don’t have to do it again. Have a look at your profile – you might find out that someone has uploaded a postcard you’ve sent! If you find something that doesn’t match what you received, then simply delete it.

We will keep the Flickr group as it is for the moment but with postcards uploads closed. In the future, we plan to use it to host photos of the Postcrossing meetups and other media related to the Postcrossing project.

We hope you all enjoy this new functionality as much as we do. Oh, and if you have comments or ideas of how to improve it, we would love to hear from you!

Last, but not least, we have a request too. This new feature will represent an increase in costs for Postcrossing (like storage and bandwidth) and is only possible to sustain if postcrossers continue to support the project by donating to it. If you enjoy this new feature, and would like to help keeping the project running, please consider visiting our support page – it’s really simple and quick. Thank you in advance! ☺

A postcard has been delivered by Britain’s Royal Mail 79 years after it was sent.

The picture postcard was sent in 1929 from Burnham-on-Crouch, Essex, and intended for Mr and Mrs Richardson in East Dulwich, London.
However it was not delivered until a week ago when it finally dropped through the letter box of Arthur Davies and June Nicolopoulos after a delay of nearly eight decades.

Mr Davies, 59, a construction manager, said: “I’ve heard of delays but this takes some beating – I reckon it’s been under a skirting board at a Royal Mail building all this time.

”It’s amazing that Royal Mail even delivered it at all after all these years."

The postcard arrived inside a Royal Mail envelope with a sticker reading, “we are sorry that this item has been damaged/delayed in the post”.

From an article on The West Australian, click to continue reading.

Wow! What a great journey this postcard has had! I wonder where that postcard had been hiding… :)

Postcrossing received this wonderful article written by Markus (aspen), who recently interviewed Geoffrey (misterteapot, from Australia) and Kati (kilona, from Finland).
If you haven’t heard the good news yet, Geoffrey and Kati met through Postcrossing, after which they fell in love and got married. They’re now living in Finland. Here’s the story:


Start postcrossing. You might get married

Postcrossing is responsable of this, laughs Geoffrey meaning his marriage with a Finn, Kati. It would not have happened if they both hadn’t been postcrossers. But what are postcrossers? Postcrossing means sending postcards to all over the world. If you send a card to Germany, you might receive one from a Brazilian postcrosser. Why? Because people want to receive real mail. This kind of hobby brought the Reynolds together. “How else could we have met? I can’t think of any other way!” says Geoffrey who has moved to Finland. The couple is crazy about postcards and Geoffrey has to close his eyes everytime there’s a post office or a card shop near. Otherwise he would go shopping.

Thousands of addresses

I have hundreds of addresses of postcrossers tells Kati and shows her black address book. Geoffrey has saved thousands of addresses to his computer. They send cards every here and there just to make other postcrossers happy. You can do postcrossing with smaller contribution also. Geoffrey joined Postcrossing after he had heard of it from his friends. It sounded a fun idea and I was curious. I noticed soon how nice people are! I noticed also how little I know about the world. In the USA some families even teach geography to their children via postcrossing. A genious idea, praises Geoffrey.

Translation done by Soili (soili). For those of you that read Finnish, the original version can be viewed in this scan of the article.

Once again, congratulations Geoffrey and Kati! :)

It’s been a month since Postcrossing launched its’ Supporters program… and it has been a success! We are really grateful to the many people that decided to generously contribute.

So, what is Postcrossing doing with your donations?

Over the time, Postcrossing has grown too big for its current server so the most important short term improvement will be a much needed server upgrade. In addition to increasing the speed of the site, it will also allow room for future improvements.
There are a lot of not-so-little ideas that have been postponed because they were dependent on the server being able to handle them. With new equipment, this should not be a problem.

PS – Lilo, our cat, is just as excited as we are :)