8 Ways to Save on Holiday Photo Cards

'Tis the season for spending on holiday greetings. According to the National Retail Federation's Holiday Consumer Spending Survey, consumers will spend an average of $29.18 on greeting cards this holiday season. And those who go for custom photo cards can end up spending much more.

The good news, however, is that snail mail holiday cards with your family's photos don't have to break the bank. There are a number of clever ways you can cut their cost. Here are eight such strategies.

Combine greetings and announcements. If you had a new baby or moved sometime close to the holiday season and you're planning to send separate baby or moving announcements and holiday cards, consider combining the traditional mailings into one.

Most photo card sites offer special designs combining holiday greetings with birth and moving announcements. On Tiny Prints, for instance, you can find holiday-type cards announcing a new baby under the "Winter Birth Announcements" category, and the site's moving announcement section has a host of holiday-themed designs too. You also could turn any birth or moving announcement design into a holiday card or vice versa simply with whatever text you choose to write to personalize the greeting.

Take your own photo. Your holiday card costs are likely to run much higher than $29, and even $100 or more, if you hire a professional photographer to snap pictures for your cards. Cut that expense by taking your own photos or asking someone you know to snap them for free. Don't trust your (or your friends') photo-taking skills? Don't despair. There are loads of tutorials online for how to take professional-quality holiday card photos yourself (search online for phrases like "how to take great holiday photos" and a number of these how-tos will come up).

Know where to shop. As pointed out on this blog last month, there are many more sites selling personalized photo cards than people may realize. Familiarizing yourself with the various services you can use -- and comparison-shopping among the sites -- is a great way to find unique and affordable designs.

Look for deals. During the holiday season, there's no shortage of special promotions for sites offering holiday photo cards like Tiny Prints and Minted. Search for discount promo codes on the sites' themselves, the sites' social network pages, in the blogosphere and via search engines. Tiny Prints, for example, recently offered a 25 percent-off deal, while Minted was running a promotion with 15 percent-off orders of $100 plus.

Skip the extras. When you're ordering personalized holiday photo cards online, the costs of extras like rounded corners and colored envelopes can quickly add up, so don't bother opting for them. Instead, if you must have rounded- or fancy-shaped corners, modify the cards yourself, once you receive them, using a scrapbooking tool (a great tip from RookieMoms.com).

Make your own design. To keep your card costs in the $29 or less range, another option is to skip using a stationary site altogether. Instead, you can construct your DIY photo backdrop and set so a holiday greeting is right there in your family photo ( like in these example photos), and then send prints of the photo as your holiday photo cards. The cost of each photo print is generally much cheaper than the cost of each personalized photo holiday card.

Trim your list. The fewer people you send cards to, the lower your greeting costs will be. So be conservative when you're ordering your photo cards or prints, and order fewer copies than you think you need. Then, consider just sending holiday wishes to those who send you cards -- you can always order more greetings if need be. This way you'll be less likely to end up with extra unsent cards once you've finished addressing greetings to everyone on your list.

Repurpose any extra cards. Finally, if you did end up ordering too many holiday cards or photo prints, make their expense worth the money by repurposing the greetings into DIY frugal activities for your kids.

To be sure, it can be cheaper to skip sending a personalized holiday photo greeting altogether and instead simply send a regular old holiday card, a handwritten note or a free online greeting. However, if you prefer the photo route (there's something festive and fun about receiving and sending such cards), the above tips are for you.

Jennifer Saranow Schultz, formerly the "Bucks" blogger for The New York Times and a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, shares daily hints to help make parenting easier and cheaper at HintMama.com, on Twitter at @HintMama and on Facebook at Facebook.com/HintMama.