NEW YORK – Coming to a mailbox near you: scores of smiling, beaming faces on holiday photo cards.

With each holiday season – and each new digital camera given as a gift — more families forgo Norman Rockwell-like illustrations or funny Far Side cards in favor of a photo to send their best wishes. The trade group Photo Marketing Association International estimates a whopping 270 million photo greeting cards were sent last year, enough for each person in the U.S. save the 30-plus million who live in California.

In a frenzied world filled with mass-market products, people are looking to personalize greetings to friends and family. Advances in technology keep making it easier and cheaper to do so, industry representatives say.

With no film costs or limitations, families can freely experiment with different kinds of photos that convey different images. Increasingly customizable printing options allow them to choose a unique message to match. And photo companies continue to offer more and more design options to wrap up the whole package. The overall effect is an intimate greeting that immediately brings you up to date on someone’s life.

“Digital photos have allowed us to do a lot of this,” says 50-year industry veteran Brian Ainsworth, owner of Photos Ar’ Nice, a photo lab and camera store in Gainesville, Fla. “You couldn’t manipulate a negative on paper this way. … We’re seeing a new era of greetings.”

Ainsworth installed kiosks in his store five years ago that allowed customers to be in charge of the design of the card, including photo cropping, greeting wording and type style. He says he made a point to offer software that is easy to use so, for example, a mother with an infant in a stroller (which conveniently fits under the kiosk) can create a card in minutes and never have to really take her mind off the baby.

Joe Struble, an archivist at the George Eastman House, a photography museum in Rochester, N.Y., said he recalls that during his own childhood his family would get two or three photos annually, always from the same families. At the museum there is a series of holiday portraits of a family that started with five children plus mom and dad – “all the portraits were very `Leave It to Beaver’ and `Ozzie and Harriet'” – and ended several years later with 13 children. They were basically in the same pose each year but with a different baby on the mother’s lap, Struble says.

Things are far less formal now, of course.

“Everyone has a camera, everyone has access to a computer, everyone can upload their photos. You can even avoid computers and upload directly from their cameras,” adds Mania Chait, vice president of public relations for VistaPrint, a Lexington, Mass.-based printing company. “It’s quicker and less expensive than making something yourself. You don’t have to take three hours,” she says.