8 Creative Ideas for Displaying Family Photos

As an enthusiastic photographer, you’ve got tons of lovely photographs of your near and dear ones, friends and family, covering all the memorable moments of their lives. It’s a real shame to relegate them to a dusty photo album or the dark platters of your hard drive. Such memories deserve the right of place in your home, where everyone can see and relive the wonderful moments gone by. Here are a few ideas by which you can be creative in displaying the photographs so dear to you, and win accolades for your interior designing skills as well! They also serve as wonderful conversation starters.

By far, the most popular method of displaying photos is framing and hanging them on walls. Choose a focal wall, one that is not cluttered, and faces a window or a source of light. You may either dedicate an entire wall to photos or just a part of it, but be sure to keep the photos at eye level.

Tips for displaying framed photos

• Keep frames of the same type. This adds consistency and unifies the photos, which would be different in feel and colour.

• Group frames together. Keeping the frames tightly opposed, rather than with gaps in between, helps form one big image. This adds appeal.

• Duct tape and connect frames to group similarly themed photos. You may also consider frame rails.

• Mix up photos – big and small, old and new, different colours and textures. This adds variety and makes for interesting viewing.

• Different arrangements can be tried - for example, a Family tree, or a Wall Art - in which you can affix photos in a particular shape, which can be a motif or an alphabet, say a heart shape for displaying your wedding photos.

Mix photos with metal or fabric wall hangings. One need not only have photos on the walls. Photos interspersed with metallic or fabric wall hangings gives tremendous aesthetic appeal. A wall clock can also fit in the scheme of things. You may try inserting a framed photo in between books on your book shelf, creating ‘sub-sections’.

If you have a multilevel house, you could hang framed photos along the staircase, again at eye level.

If you feel you have just too many photos to display and not enough real estate on your walls, a digital photo frame is the perfect solution. They come in various sizes, and you can upload hundreds of photos onto them, which they keep displaying one after the other in a pre-programmed or random fashion. Just make sure to go for as high a resolution as you can afford. Again, you can group 3 to 4 such frames of varying sizes together, upload different photos on each and have a dynamic photo collage!

A room divider or partition screen, often used in large rooms to create changeable partitions, can be used as a display for photos.

A wooden or cork board covered in maroon or red velvet makes a beautiful ‘Bulletin Board’, where you may display snapshots and ‘Just-In’ photos. You can then pick the best ones and give them a permanent place either on the walls or the album. Such a display would be dynamic and photos would keep changing with each event in your home. Here`s a tutorial on how to make one yourself.

Well these are again areas popularly used to display family photos. The advantages of using these areas is the photos can be easily moved about or changed, and leave no telltale holes in the wall!

Speaking of holes in the wall, one way of changing photos on the wall, without leaving it looking like a battlefield, is to install a photo-ledge, which would be a simple wooden or metallic ledge attached on the wall. You can place framed photos on the ledge and keep changing them until you hit upon the perfect combination.