This article analyses postcards depicting disasters in the early years of the 20th Century. At that time, postcards were common means of communicating everyday matters throughout the world, as they were affordable even to the poorest people. Devastating disasters were happening around the globe, some with more than 200,000 deaths, like China's 1920 Haiyuan (Gansu) Earthquake, which had almost no journalism coverage. Other events were almost a hundred times less fatal, like 1906 Chile's Valparaíso Earthquake, depicted by a vast production of postcards. This raises the question ‘Why were some disasters portrayed in postcards and others might not have been?’ To answer it, we use a historical methodology that evokes the context in which ten selected global disasters happened. Data include the postcards themselves as well as documents and shared data of collectors, and historians. We focus on postcards' role as a means of communication and on who, apart from the publishers, editors, and photographers, was involved in their production. Findings reveal that the locations of the disasters were primarily explained as to whether disaster postcards were produced or might have not. If they happened in a region where stakeholders had political, financial, or business interests, the opportunity to produce postcards depicting the event would not be wasted. Remote regions that were difficult to access did not get popularised regardless of the death toll, especially when such regions were populated by marginalised ethnic groups. The potential that disaster postcards had, has been consciously used or dismissed.