Image Credit: Shutterfly

Going to a store to pick out a greeting card can be tedious and annoying. First you have to flip through each card, likely never finding one that says exactly what you want. Then you've got to find the matching envelope. And then you've got to get in line and pay for it.

Today Shutterfly is launching Treat with just those issues in mind.

The new service allows users to personalize existing greeting cards with their own pictures and text. While the digital photo-sharing and photo-customizing site, which offers ways to put photos on mugs, shirts, and calendars, has had a similar offering before, they are dedicating the entire Treat site to just cards.

There will be 4,500 fully customizable card designs at first and they have a partnership with Hallmark.

Users can customize all parts of the card and insert photos on the cover, the middle and even the back. The templates will provide a blueprint, but users can tweak colors and fonts to their liking. Each card costs $2.99 and Shutterfly is offering the first card for free.

Shutterfly will offer an iOS mobile app later this summer, which will allow people to make cards on their iPhone or iPad. Apple offers a similar Cards app for iOS, but Shutterfly says it has a much wider selection of card designs. Both the Treat app and the website will allow users to import their friends' birth dates from Facebook. It also has a reminder service to let you know it's time to send a card.

You can visit www.treat.com now to check out the new site, and remember it takes one to three days for the card to ship so you might just want to start thinking about Mother's Day now.