Tip Of The Week - Photo Gallery

In honor of the Thanksgiving this week, I wanted to do a post based around families!

I am HUGE on having family pictures in every room of the house and really displaying your life in this way.

People often struggle with how to hang pictures on the wall and how to display them so I thought I would show some examples.

Now here is a full on photo gallery. This is a wall next to our ping pong table at my family cabin.

The pictures on here are all in sepia tone, the frames are all different but they coordinating with each other.

The way to create a gallery like this, map out a section (square) that you want the pictures to stay within. We measured on both sides the same square section and had 4 frames create the 4 corners of that square. Then you just fill in the center of that with your remaining frames.

*Always lay your frames on the ground and map out how you want it first before you start hanging!

I really do love it when there are a ton of frames clustered together, they make a BIG statement and they show people what is important to you.

Now here is the photo gallery in my office. I had these 3 shelves sitting in my house from buying them at my neighbor's moving sale and I knew I wanted them in my office and I new I wanted them worked into a photo gallery. After contemplating on it for months, I finally came up with this arrangement.

It obviously isn't completely finished since there are frames still empty, but when I said and done, I opted to create more of a triangle shape with my pictures and that entirely came down to the very top painting of Cabo San Lucas that we got on our trip and I wanted to display it.

This gallery is entirely focused on our travels. I have to get a lot more of our travel pictures up, but I wanted to show people the things that we have done and have it as a constant reminder to us of our fun travels together.

The great thing about this arrangement is that not all of the pictures are hung. Why not lean them on a shelf and why not layer them on top of each other? Potterybarn is the master at photo galleries and I looked at a lot to kind of get an idea of how I wanted this one to be. The great thing about layering, you can usually get more pictures in a small space.

People LOVE looking at pictures when they come into your home so it is a great thing to have out on display.

Something that makes this work well is that because I wanted to keep all of the pictures in their original form and have color to them, the black frames help keep it consistent. If I had colored pictures and different colored frames, it would look really busy and take away from the pictures.

Now here is something a bit more simple.... 3 of the exact same frames clustered together in a row. Once again I opted for black frames (just worked in my home) and I framed pictures of our new little family shortly after my daughter was born.

These pictures are in my front living room so people can come right in and have something personal to look at.

Now on the same wall but in the family room I have this family picture hanging. I wanted to show you this to give you an idea....... Only hang a single picture if it is in proportion to the wall. So many people will hang a single picture like this on a wall and the wall will be much to large for that one picture.

Use your good judgement as to the size of the frame as to the wall.

Another thing to notice when hanging pictures..... Where you are hanging it. So many people will hang their pictures to high or right smack dab in the middle of the wall.

There is a rule that if you divide your wall into thirds horizontally, you should hang your picture somewhere on the top line.

Now I have created a rule that works great for me in my house.... James is a good amount taller than me but I have found that if I hang my pictures a bit high for my eye level and bit low for his eye level, it is a perfect height for us.

Hopefully in the future I can do another post on this and show more examples because I know that it is something that a lot of people struggle with.

Have fun with your photos and displaying them..... people really do love to see who you are on a personal level when they enter into your home.