I have around 200 but I’m not sure if I want to go a lot more than that, storing and organizing that could get problematic and sometimes having too big of a choice can be anxiety inducing for me
I am a noob so I only have 17 cards in my card file box right now (was 25 but I have sent some). I can only have 6 “travelling” at a time so any more on hand at this point would be excessive! I do have a nice variety though - some cards of places I have travelled recently & of my home town, some cards featuring native Australian flora & fauna, some cute “vintage style” cards based on 1950s & 60s travel agency posters advertising trips to Australia (these are my personal favourites), & some fun/humour cards.
When I get down to 10 cards I will order some more from my favourite online sellers & grab some when I go past the local Tourist Info centre to get the stocks back up to 30 in the hopes that I will be allowed to have more travelling soon!!!
Way too many just because the 2023 stats came out recently, just under 100 cards officially mailed, then a few at RRs.
But about 200-300 new cards bought. A tiny imbalance.
I never counted the cards. It’s hard for me to estimate either.
Pictures say more…
I havn’t buy one card the whole year. This is quite a good result of disciplin, I think In the German Corner we have a challange to count sent cards and those which came new unwritten into stock. We are dackelernaing with a great group to keep an eye and avoid uncontrolled purchases
In my cabinet are 8 boxes of uncounted cards and nearly 900 cards of my litte village here, but they don’t count really.
As a poor student maybe around 20-30ish at once but I also like to spoil and personally buy people something they really like, I also take like a couple hours on each card because I use stickers, washi tapes, have little drawings etc. and try to have the neatest handwriting to make each card feel as special as possible
I also sometimes make my own hand-drawn laminated postcards, but I only send those to people who specifically like handmade things. Wouldn’t force them on anyone who doesn’t obviously.
Not enough!!!
Maybe 500 but I always need to buy mooooreeee
300, 500, 1000… Some people here sending a docen per week… Sweet Lord, I just bought, like, 15 postcards and I’ll get a few more today in the city I am going to, and I already am telling myself that it’s okay, that I have enough postcards to last me a couple months (sending them officially through Postcrossing, I mean - I can only send 5 at a time). My goodness, so this is how it feels being newbie to a new hobby, huh?
I live in a small village, and there was only one newspaper shop that sold postcards of my village. Last year they retired and I managed to buy all their stock for a very low price. And they had even older postcards in stock that they gave to me for the same price. So now I have thousands of postcards of my village alone. And I don’t even mention my other cards that I have in stock
I probably have the same, but it eleven years worth. I don’t have access to them all, so I have a few boxes that I replenish every now and then.
I just flipped through my postcards and there are about 100 of them.
Too many…
To my defence, before starting Postcrossing (2007), I was collecting postcards from Boomerang/Boemerang. They were free/ad cards. Many are amazing, some just weird, but mostly fun or pretty. So when I started I already had a collection of 2.000+ cards (because I had doubles too). For Postcrossing I just bought some touristic cards and it escalated quite quickly from there…
I recently sorted through my collection of free cards and gave away a whole box (one like you have for printer paper). So I have about 1 box of freecards left, 1 box with regular cards… and one box that I bought from a store that was going out of business. It is full of amazing tourist cards.
But I haven’t bought anything new for 4-5 years. It think…
Edit: I bought a bunch of Christmas postcards last December…
Personally I didn’t count them but I do have a couple of sets that I separate to for swap ( since those are a bit hard to send out due the specific categorie ) and to send out
Maybe in total I can say around 500-600 but now I personally buy only a couple like max 10 if I go on a trip somewhere and keep at least 1 for my travel/junk journal
Usually more than100 postcards.
I think how many you have in stock depends on: what is available, do you have the money for it, and do you have the space for it.
If less different cards are available, I would have less in stock.
I estimate I have about 8000 cards that wait to be sent!
I had two massive strokes of luck, when the gentleman I bought my cards from, wanted to retire and sold me most of his card stock (more than 5000, easily) for a really reasonable amount of money in 2015. I had to go there 4 times with my shopping trolley to pick them up! All touristy, my favourites.
Then, last year, a friend who had MASSES of cards, gave up Postcrossing… and her cards away. I had to take a taxi home. Twice!
Still… sometimes I still buy cards!
That sounds about right
I love the ways you got so many. That’s keeping contacts open so you can make the most of these opportunities.
I keep about 30, and reorder when it comes down to about 5.
Just bought about 25 postcards today to add to the collection. Because i was running short on animals. No at the moment i have about 100 postcards in stock
What are view cards vs non view cards? I’m new to postcrossing and don’t understand the difference.
@Sjwiley A view card is a postcard showing a real-life view (hence the name) of a city, building, landscape etc. Sometimes view cards are also called tourist cards. It depends on personal taste if only photo cards are considered view cards, or if illustrations, paintings and drawings of real-life places are also considered view cards. Such illustrated view cards are especially popular in the area of the former Soviet Union in my experience, but I found a few of them for my city Frankfurt am Main as well. Most really old (older than 100 years) cards are illustrations (often lithographies), because at the time photos could not be made into prints, and using real photo paper was a lot more expensive and time-consuming than printing. My personal preference are phto cards (except for Postcrossing meet-up cards, where I collect all designs).
Non-view cards are all other cards: Illustrations, animals (photo or not), art, quotes, recepies…
Some view card examples:
I should add that there are two types of view cards: single-view and multi-view. As the names suggest, single-view cards have one view or photo (like the 3 examples above), while multi-view cards have more than one (I think the highest number of views on a regular-size card I have seen so far are 111 views). Some examples of multi-view cards:
Count the views on the last example!