2026-09-24
Making your own holiday photo card? Here's what a transparent cutout actually solves
Shutterfly's own account of last season puts the number at over 180 million holiday cards produced by the company alone — enough to reach more than half the U.S. population — and the same report says the average card in 2024 carried 4.5 photos, up 32% since 2020 and 21% higher than 2023. More photos per card, not fewer. If you're already thinking about this year's card in late September, you're not early: card-planning guides consistently put family photos in September and October, with ordering deadlines landing in early-to-mid November. Here's what actually happens once you try to fit more than one photo — especially a pet, which shows up on 11% of Shutterfly's cards — into a single card design, and exactly where a background cutout does and doesn't help.
The timeline the card companies themselves recommend
Card-etiquette guide Greenvelope's own 2026 timeline lays out the season in stages: professional or DIY photos in September or October, addresses gathered through the fall, printed cards ordered two to three weeks before Thanksgiving — which lands around November 5–12 in 2026 — and envelopes mailed the last week of November into the first week of December. Shutterfly's own holiday-card report confirms the demand curve matches: most customers place bulk orders during Cyber Monday week, but order volume already starts climbing in late October, per the company's own numbers. None of that is NearBG's claim to make — it's the timeline the card industry publishes about itself. It does mean that the week a family photo gets taken is usually a few weeks before anyone opens a card-design tool, and that gap is where a lot of "how do I fix this photo" searches happen.
Why one photo starts fighting the template's own background
Open Canva's, Shutterfly's, or Vistaprint's photo-card templates and most of them work the same way: your uploaded photo drops into a designed layout — a snowy border, a colored panel, a multi-photo collage grid — not onto a blank page. That only looks right when the photo itself has no competing background of its own. A living room, a couch, a stretch of sidewalk behind the family all print exactly as photographed, sitting inside the template's own graphic border like a second, unwanted background layered behind the first. Canva's own background-remover feature exists specifically for this: click a photo, click BG Remover, and Canva exports it as a transparent PNG rather than a flat rectangle — the same reason, covered in more technical depth in this blog's print-on-demand post, that a JPEG can't do this at all: the format has no alpha channel, so every pixel prints as fully opaque no matter how plain it looks on screen.
More photos per card is exactly where this gets worse, not better
A single, well-composed family portrait rarely needs any of this — crop it, drop it in, and the one background it has is fine. The problem shows up once a card starts combining photos taken on different days, in different rooms, against different walls, which per Shutterfly's own report is now the more common case: 4.5 photos on the average 2024 card, up sharply from prior years, and 11% of cards including a pet photographed separately from the family shot. Crop each photo tightly and you still keep a rectangle of whatever was behind it — a couch cushion, a leash, a different shade of wall paint — and once two or three of those rectangles sit side by side in one layout, the mismatched backgrounds are the first thing anyone notices. Cutting each subject out to a transparent PNG removes that mismatch outright: nothing but the person or pet remains, and the template's own single background shows through consistently behind all of them. The specific trouble spots in that cutout — stray fur, loose hair, a leash strap — are exactly what this blog's hair-and-matting post and its pet-photo post already cover in depth.
| Situation | Photo left as-is | Subject cut to a transparent PNG first |
|---|---|---|
| One family photo, one background you're happy to keep | Crop and go — no cutout needed | Not necessary |
| Family photo + a separate pet photo | Two different rooms print side by side as two visible backgrounds in one card | Only the family and the pet remain; one template background shows through both |
| A living room, yard, or cluttered background you don't want printed | Prints regardless of how tightly the frame is cropped around the edges | Removed entirely — only the subject stays |
| Several people photographed on different days | Each keeps its own background, which collides once arranged together | Each becomes a transparent PNG a template can place side by side without a seam |
What NearBG actually does here — and what still happens somewhere else
- Removes each photo's background in the browser, one photo at a time. Nothing uploads anywhere — the same on-device pipeline covered in this blog's first post — which matters more for a family holiday card than most photos, since these are often photos of children and relatives that people are otherwise about to hand to a cloud photo-card service anyway; the privacy tradeoffs of that step specifically are covered in this blog's upload-safety post.
- Exports a transparent PNG, not a finished card. NearBG cuts out the subject and stops there — it doesn't lay out a multi-photo template, add holiday graphics or text, or place an order. That final design-and-print step still happens in Canva, Shutterfly, Vistaprint, or whichever service is printing the card, exactly the same hand-off described in this blog's print-on-demand post.
- Includes a manual touch-up brush for the edges the automatic pass leaves messy — loose hair, a pet's fur, a leash strap — with a one-click reset back to the untouched automatic result if a cleanup pass goes wrong.
- Doesn't resize or crop to a specific template's photo slot. The exported PNG stays at whatever resolution the source photo produced; fitting it into a particular card layout's exact dimensions is a step you'd still do in the card tool afterward.
Honest summary
None of the numbers above are NearBG's to claim credit for — they're Shutterfly's own report on its own cards, and Greenvelope's own published timeline for the season. What they add up to is this: card designs are combining more separate photos than they used to, a pet photo shows up on roughly one in nine of them, and every one of those templates is built to show its own single background, not whatever room each photo happened to be taken in. A background cutout doesn't design the card, add the text, or place the order — it just makes sure the photo has nothing left in it to compete with the template once you get there.