A couple of years ago, I purchased some DBT flash cards, as I felt I needed something physical to flick through when in moments of distress. This was a digital purchase though, and I needed some way to get this .PDF file into the real world. So in this short post, I’ll go into the process of printing these out essentially for free*, and might be something you could consider too.

Etsy

I purchased these from Etsy, who have a large market for all sorts of “printables” - flash cards, diaries, workbooks, colouring sheets…! While some of these are to be written in, my flash cards were full coloured and meant for regular handling, so an average black and white printer with average paper would not do.

Free Printing*

Although my first instinct was to look at companies which specialise in custom printing, I quickly realised that many were geared towards the wholesale/business market, and the rest were quite expensive.

However, in the United Kingdom at least, there are a plethora of services which offer to print your photos for free, in the hopes that they can entice you to perhaps spend a bit more on a photo book, higher finishes to the photos, or maybe something else entirely - how about your photos on wall art or on a mug?

Such services include:

• FreePrints
• SnapFish
• PhotoBox
• FreeSnaps

However, you can just stick to the basic offering, and you can get your photos printed for free*

*Though you must pay the delivery charge, which may become quite substantial. Shop around!

Prepping

However, I am not sending off photos to be printed, and the .PDF that arrived for the DBT flash cards was presented by having four cards per sheet. I began the tedious process of saving screenshots of each card (using Shottr and its “Capture Area” function), and then applying the screenshots to a fixed-sized document in Affinity Photo to create uniformity between all the cards, to fit the standard size of 6x4 inches/15x10cm.

Once I had all the cards in individual files, I was then able to submit them to the service of my choice, select a matte finish for better durability, and purchased for all under £5.

End Product

They arrived in about a week, and I’m very happy with them! The card has a bit of heft about it, so I’m never afraid it’ll accidentally tear, the matte finish means they’re easier to see and touch than with a glossy finish, the colours are vibrant, and all the text came out really clearly, with no blurriness.

As such, if there is anything relatively small you wish to be printed out in colour and on decent card quality, it might be worth looking into these service as a cheap way for getting it done!