Can I Add My Own Photo to a Group Card?
This is one of the questions we're asked most, and the answer is yes — but there are two very different situations hiding inside it. One is a signer wanting a photo next to their message. The other is an organiser wanting their own picture as the card itself. They work differently, so here's both.
If you're signing someone else's card
You've been sent a signing link, you've written your message, and you'd like a photo to go with it. On the signing page there's a field labelled Links (YouTube, GIFs, or images). Paste the web address of your photo there and it appears alongside your message when the card is opened.
The important word is address. There's no file upload on the signing page — deliberately, because signing needs no account and we don't want to hold a copy of everyone's photos. So the picture has to already be online somewhere: a shared album, a Google Photos or Dropbox link set to "anyone with the link", an image host like Imgur, or anywhere else public.
The one mistake that stops it working
Almost every "my photo didn't show up" message we get comes down to the same thing: the link points at the page the photo is on, not the photo itself. A Google Photos share link, for example, opens a whole viewer — that's not an image.
The address needs to end in .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif or .webp. The reliable way to get that: right-click the image itself and choose Copy image address (Chrome and Edge), Copy Image Link (Safari) or Copy Image Link (Firefox). On a phone, a long-press on the image usually offers the same thing. Paste that, and it turns into a picture.
A few other things worth knowing
- →You can add up to five links to one message — a couple of photos and a GIF is fine.
- →A YouTube link becomes a playable video right there in the card. Great for a clip of the team, or the song that always comes on at the Christmas party.
- →GIFs work the same way as photos: paste the direct address (ending in .gif) and it animates in the card.
- →The photo isn't copied to SimpleCards — the card loads it from wherever you hosted it. If you delete it there later, it disappears from the card too.
If you're the organiser and want your photo as the card
This one does have a proper upload. When you're creating the card, choose the blank canvas template and you'll be offered an upload button. Pick a photo straight from your device — a team photo, a logo, a picture of the person the card is for — and it becomes the card's cover.
Once it's in, you can move the cover text to wherever it reads best on the image, change its colour and font, and adjust the overlay so the words stand out against a busy photo. The preview updates as you go, so you can see it before anyone else does.
One thing to get right first time: the cover image is fixed once the card exists. You can still change the cover text and its style afterwards from the dashboard, but not swap the picture itself — we've written up what you can and can't change after creating a card.
Which one do you need?
If someone sent you a link and asked you to sign: it's the first one — paste an image address next to your message. If you're the person who set the card up and wants it to look a particular way: it's the second — upload a cover when you create it.