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From canvas prints to framed photos, having images of our families, our travels, and our lives in our homes helps showcase what’s important to us. When it comes to hanging and then displaying your family photos, you have more options than ever before to get creative and make everything your own.
Below is a guide to some of the most important things you should know along the way.
The Best Places to Showcase Family Photos
When you’re starting to strategize how you’ll showcase your collection of family photos, one of the initial things you’ll think about is where you’ll put them.
There’s no right or wrong answer because ultimately it’s your home, and you should do what makes you happy.
For some ideas, however, you might include them in your main rooms where your family gathers the most, like your living room, den, or kitchen. It makes sense that you can make these gathering places even warmer and inviting for everyone in the family. Your main rooms need a focal point that draws the eye to them as soon as someone comes in, so why not make it family photos?
Transition spaces are another good option. These include your hallways, walkways, and stairways. These places tend to get overlooked when you’re decorating, but you can display your favorite family memories here and make them feel more cohesive and finished, like the design of the rest of your home.
Any of your bonus spaces, like playrooms or offices, are also great places for family photos.
Choosing Photos
If you’re like most of us, the hardest part of displaying photos is narrowing down your favorites. To get started, consider the following:
- Take an inventory. For most of us, the vast majority of our photos are stored on our phones. You might already have some favorites in mind, and you can start going through your camera roll and creating folders that will help you find those favorites when you’re ready to have them printed and frame or hang them. If you use a photo editing app, you can organize your images within that into categorized albums. You might have thousands of photos on your phone, so organizing becomes a big task.
- Once you have everything organized into folders, start thinking about a theme. Your theme might be candid photos that you’ll use to create a gallery roll, or maybe you base themes on different events, like your family travels. You might have multiple spaces where you plan to hang family photos, and if so, of course, you can also have multiple themes. You might break up your themes into playful photos versus more formal ones too.
- You need to make sure you’re choosing the photos that are the most high-quality. If you upload your photo to a site that’s going to print them or put them on canvas, they should be able to tell you if they’re high-quality enough to be printed. Most iPhone photos can be printed as large as 32×40 before the image quality starts to decline.
- Depending on what you’re going to do with them, it’s a good idea to edit your photos, which we’ll talk more about below.
The Basics of Photo Editing
If you want your photos to look impeccable, you can edit them. If you took them on your iPhone, you could do basic editing pretty easily. The best tool for editing on your phone is already installed. It’s simply called Photos. Photos are, of course, the app you use to view your library of images, and it’s pre-installed. It’s a stock app that Apple doesn’t let users delete.
When you edit your photos in the app, the changes are non-destructive, meaning they don’t ever overwrite the original image. You can go back to the original whenever you want. Your edited photos are also synced to iCloud Photos, so you should be able to see them on all of the devices that are connected to your Apple ID. You can also edit videos, as a side note.
Once you open the Photos app, you tap the image you want to edit so that it becomes full screen. You should see the Edit option in the upper right corner.
The options in the Photos app for editing include:
- Adjust: This looks like a dial, and this lets you edit details, the light, and colors. Auto Enhance is a good starting point to get those images ready to frame and hang. The light controls include things like exposure and brilliance. Color controls include saturation, vibrance, and warmth and the details controls include sharpness and definition. These are great options to help your images look cohesive with one another. For example, you can make the theme built around the warmth of the tones in the image.
- Filters let you edit your colors, which is another way to build a theme for hanging your photos.
- Cropping lets you flip, rotate, straighten, or of course, crop your image.
- If you used Portrait mode when you took the original picture, you could then use the Portrait feature in Photos to edit lighting effects and aperture.
Should You Frame Your Photos?
Once your photos are edited and you’re starting to plan to get them printed, you’ll also need to think about whether you’re going to frame them.
If you’re having them printed on canvases, you may not want to frame them. That’s one of the compelling things about canvas prints—they’re ready to hang on your wall without the added steps or cost of framing them. Of course, if you prefer, you can frame them.
If you have printed images on some type of paper, you’re going to have to frame them.
When you’re choosing frames, look at the colors of the image, and try to choose frames that will complement it. For example, if it’s a very vibrant, brightly colored photo, maybe a neutral frame with a simple design will balance it out.
You’ll need to think about where you’re going to hang it too. You don’t need your frames to match everything in a room color-wise, but you do want them to coordinate. It’s better than the frames you choose to accent everything else in the room rather than being a distraction.
Frame quality is important too. When you choose a higher-quality frame, along with looking beautiful, it will protect your images from things like light, dirt, and moisture.
Creative Ways to Hang Your Photos
There are a lot of ways you can hang and display your photos once they’re printed or framed and ready to go. Ideas include:
- Pair portraits. If you have pictures of your children, for example, you can pair two portraits together. If you’re just doing two, make sure they’re large enough to fill whatever the space is where you’re hanging them.
- Go crazy with your display. You can fill in an entire wall with photos in different sizes. It’s a great way to introduce a bit of chaos into an otherwise very organized and orderly part of your home for fun and visual interest.
- Go for the unexpected by hanging a gallery in your kitchen. Just make sure everything is under glass to keep it protected from cooking oils and moisture.
- Display from floor to ceiling. You’ll probably use larger-scale frames for this.
- Rather than hanging all of your photos, a photo ledge can be a unique way to showcase family photos. You can use a wide ledge and overlap frames of different sizes. You also want to mix it up and have some horizontal and some vertical photos in the mix if you’re using a ledge.
- A wall-sized photo mural is an amazing way to use one of your favorite photos. You can have it made like wallpaper.
- Do a grid display. Not everyone likes chaos when they’re designing a photo wall, so do what works for you. If you have a spacious wall, doing a grid’s going to feel orderly and polished. You want to choose photos that all have the same general feel if you’re doing a grid. For example, maybe you make it with photos that are all from a single photo session.
- Mix items in that aren’t photos. If you’re doing a gallery wall, you can add other things onto the wall to break up the photos, like momentoes or 3D pieces.
- If you have a lot of small photos you’d like to use, group them in one big frame together.
- Play around with mat colors. We often think of mats as being either white or ivory, but what if you used black and white photos and then colorful mats? You’d probably want to keep the frames simple if you’re going to do this, but again, it’s your home, and they’re your photos, so do what you love.
Finally, if you like to switch your photos out, you can use metal wires hanging parallel to your wall. Then you can clip the photos on. It’s modern and a bit avant-garde.