How to Create a Photo Gallery at Home

Hanging up photos in your living room, home office, or even your kitchen to bring life and character into the space. 
I've mentioned this before, but there's also something to be said about having photographs printed and tangible in your hands; The feel of the paper, the lustre finish, the way the colors pop! Magical. 

Since I've had the pleasure of photographing the coolest clients, I thought to put together a how-to guide on creating your own photo gallery to put up in your home or office space. 

First, you're going to need to find a good spot in your home (or office) with enough wall space.  Try not to put it where it's hard to see or where there is a lot of clutter. Putting up photos all together creates a sense of busy-ness and you don't want it to create clutter rather than a beautiful design to your space.

The wall space can be large, small, tall or wide. In this instance, my wall space looks to be more on the wider side since the ceiling is fairly short.

In order to begin the process of designing, I would advise either sketching it out on a piece of paper. You can draw out little squares or rectangles or whatever shapes your framed photographs are in. This doesn't have to be perfect or measured out. This is just to get into the flow of how you may want your gallery to look like.

Once you find a good design, you are ready to begin putting together your gallery.

Things You'll Need:

• Scissors
• Painter's Tape
• Marker
• Packing Paper or Butcher Paper
• Measuring Tape
• Your Photos
• Your Frames​

​Optional:

• Ladder (depending on if you need the height)
• Command strips  (instead of nails and a drill)
• Leveler

Step 1: 

Have your packing paper (or butcher's paper) laid out on a flat surface like a counter top or the floor. Put a frame faced down on the packing paper. Putting it faced down avoids accidentally dropping something on the glass of the frame and breaking it. Also, this avoids accidents like drawing on the glass with a sharpie. Now that they are faced down on the paper, you're going to trace around the frame. You're essentially creating a size replica of your frame. Once that's done, cut out the shapes and set aside.

Step 2:

Gather all your lose pieces of paper that are shaped like your frames and get ready to do some tapping. 
Using your painter's tape, grab each piece of paper and tape it to the wall where you would want your frame to be. This is used as a mock up of your photo gallery. 

The reason why this part if helpful is because A) you're not actually nailing down anything right away (or my case, Command stripping away) and B) painter's tape is super forgiving on just about any surface and C) it's just easier to move a piece of paper around while you're still designing than a bunch of frames.
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Once you have your mock up of your gallery ready exactly where you like it, you're ready to start putting your frames up.

Step 3:

For those of you who like precision, you could use a measuring tape (and even a leveler) to make sure the frames are all straight and evenly separated from one another. I used the tape measure just to get the height and width of the whole gallery-- not so much the space between frames (but you can if you want to).

And since I'm in a renter's space, I chose not to damage the walls with nails and drill so I opted to use a few heavy duty Command strips to hang up my frames. ​When using these Command strips make sure you're paying attention to the suggested weight limit for each strip which is written on the front of the packaging if you don't want to wake up in the middle of the night to your frames crashing down and breaking (that's not fun to clean up at 2 a.m.)

Your photos don't have to match if you don't want them to. If you have a pretty monochrome space at home, and you want to add some color mix and matching the colors or design patterns can add some fun interest to your walls and home if that's what you're going for.

In my studio, I have photos I've taken here and there, from our vacation trips, some Disney illustrations we purchased from Disneyland (because #obsessed) and some cute drawings from the children in our lives. Although, I would like to change out the photos whenever another great image or drawing comes up, for now I'm happy how my small gallery came out.

​Once they're up, you're going to see just how beautiful your wall can be. And even better, how many memories you've created.

Here are some examples of galleries you can incorporate in your home:

​1. Mix and Match Sizes

2. One Big Photo and Four Small frames

3. Two Sizes / Symmetry