How to make a holiday card from a photo you already have

Every year the same thing happens. You mean to book the photographer in October, you don't, and by the time you think about it again the good weekends are gone and everyone is quoting December rates. So you dig through your phone for a picture where all five of you are looking at the camera, and there isn't one, and the card doesn't get sent.

There are six holiday looks live now. You upload one photo you already have, pick one, and about twenty seconds later you have the card.

What they are

Christmas Card. Coordinated festive knitwear, a lit tree gone soft behind you, a garlanded mantelpiece, warm low light. This is the one most people want: it looks like the photo you would have got if the photographer had turned up.

Vintage Christmas. The same room, thirty years earlier. Warm faded colour, soft focus at the edges, the particular orange cast of a photograph that has been in a drawer since 1956.

Hanukkah Portrait. Candlelight at the table, the menorah lit, warm light on everyone's faces and the rest of the room falling away into the dark.

New Year's Eve. Just after midnight. Black tie and sequins, gold confetti in the air and a lot of out-of-focus light behind you.

Winter Wonderland. Deep snow, low sun through pines, breath in the air and everyone in proper coats.

North Pole. The village rather than the costume. Timber workshops with their windows lit, candy-cane posts, lanterns, stacks of parcels, the sleigh at the edge of the frame and a green aurora over the snow. You stay in your own coat and hat. Nobody is dressed as Father Christmas, and nobody who was not in your photograph turns up in it.

The part that matters

Everyone still looks like themselves.

That is the whole job, and it's the thing these tools usually get wrong. Faces keep their structure. Apparent age doesn't move, so nobody's grandmother comes back at forty. Glasses stay on. A head covering stays on, and sits under a woolly hat rather than being replaced by one. Whatever expression somebody was pulling, they are still pulling it.

And the headcount holds. Five people in your photograph come back as the same five, standing where they already were. Nothing invents a sixth relative in the background, which is a failure these models reach for whenever the format implies a group portrait.

What it costs

Seven tokens a photo, the same for every look. Your first few are covered by the signup grant, nothing renews, and tokens don't expire. If one comes back wrong you are not charged for it.

The photo you upload is checked, stripped of its location data and kept private. The pictures on this page are not customers' photographs; they are a synthetic set made for the purpose, which is the only reason we can publish them at all.

Start now, not in December

The looks are live today, and the reason to do this in the first week of December rather than the third is that everything after the photo still takes time. Whatever you do with it, printing, posting or just sending it round, starts the day you have the picture, not the day you remember you need one.

Pick a photo where everybody is in frame and looking roughly the right way. It doesn't need to be a good photo. That is the point.