Canadian Custom Postage

Custom postage options have come into being in at least a few countries. Sticking to the English-speaking ones, besides the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK have programs.

In Canada, it’s called “Picture Postage,” and like so much else in that bilingual country, it has instructions in both French and English. The Canadian custom postage program has the nice option of allowing people to mail in photographs to be used, though they do warn that the photo might be damaged in the manufacturing process. In their program, you have to receive permission beforehand if you use a photo of another person — thereby eliminating some problems but also eliminating surprise gifts!

Canadian stamps seem to lack the barcodes that are present on US stamps.  The sheet shown here is one way you can get their postage, with a keepsake example on the top.

The Canadians give some good tips on how to create a well designed custom postage stamp. They say your digital image should be of good resolution and must be in jpeg (which includes jpg)format. The file size can’t be any larger than 7 MB, which is quite large, and they do warn you that larger files will take longer to upload to their site. Pictures of people should be close up, preferably from the waist up or closer. With groups, keep it to just a few people and with their faces the most evident part. They also advise correcting “red eye” or any other flaws in the photo.

Canadian Picture Postage evidently existed before photo stamps came into being in the US. I haven’t yet tracked down which country started the custom postage movement, but it’s clearly popular in many places!