The Print Shop for Mac’s creator, Broderbund, also makes another greeting card program we reviewed: PrintMaster Platinum v8. The Print Shop handles different graphic design projects than PrintMaster Platinum, including brochures, business cards and calendars. It isn’t made specifically for designing greeting cards, but The Print Shop has templates for all major holidays and events, including baby showers, weddings and anniversaries, in its greeting card section. Given how old this software is, it no longer ranks among the best greeting card software today.
PrintMaster and The Print Shop have many of the same graphics and templates, but they have different layouts and editing tools. Also, The Print Shop has around 10,000 fewer images and 500 fewer templates to choose from.
The overlap in templates, backgrounds and images is a little disappointing because we had the same problems with pixelation in both programs. When we resized graphics, we got a warning that our images might not print cleanly if we tried to make them larger, and we frequently saw jagged or rough edges. Our favorite programs, Canva and Hallmark, come with high-resolution or scalable vector graphics you can resize to fit your designs without quality degradation. While The Print Shop has more images than some greeting card programs, none in its library are particularly trendy or stylish.
The Print Shop has a cleaner interface than PrintMaster Platinum. Its tools are on a menu that runs along the top of the program. Along the side, you can connect to an online store to buy more clip art or browse through tabs to access your photos and other uploaded files.
It’s surprising that even though you can connect to Broderbund’s online store through the program, it doesn’t have web sharing features. For example, you can’t share directly from The Print Shop to Facebook or Twitter. This limited connectivity is typical of greeting card software designed for macOS. Our top pick, Canva, has a lot of social media features, allowing you to share links and embed your projects on websites. However, it’s an online platform, not downloadable software like The Print Shop.
The Print Shop is one of only two Mac greeting card programs that come with basic photo editing tools. Because Apple includes photo editing and storage features as part of its operating system, programs developed for Macs often leave them out. However, it’s easier to manage files in one location, rather than opening and navigating several at a time. As such, greeting card design programs with tools that remove red-eye or crop photos are preferable.
The Print Shop for Mac is one of only two programs we tested with basic photo editing tools. It’s also the only program we reviewed designed mainly for projects other than greeting cards. Even though they are made by the same developer, The Print Shop has a cleaner interface than PrintMaster Platinum v8. However, it’s clip art and templates suffer from the same quality problems.
