Family Photo Frame Up

Unless you are selling your home (that's another blog post!), displaying family photos is an opportunity to inject warmth and personality to your home. Remember two things when displaying almost anything - be selective and have a theme. The selective part can be hard - you may have great photos of your children from age 0 to 18! Resist the urge to display them all and to spread them all over the house. Grouping any collection heightens its impact. By theme, I mean try to choose something that holds the grouping together - special vacation shots, photos developed in black and white, even frames that aren't identical but have a common element can help establish a theme.

I love using frames as a decorating tool and am always keeping my eye open for interesting options - sometimes the frame dictates the photo! The hint of gold and the couples in beautiful backdrops help establish the theme in the first picture below. The distressed black frames do the job in the second picture.


Pottery Barn makes it easy to pull together frame groupings. This silver gives the traditional grouping below sparkle and impact.



The same rules of grouping selectively and finding your theme apply to wall groupings too. The additional challenge of wall groupings is hanging the pictures straight! There are great tools available now to help get the picture placement perfect. The photo below is from The Picture Wall Company which provides a variety of templates and frames to take the guesswork out of the project. The template keeps the pictures from getting too spread out over the wall - a cardinal sin in grouping photos along with hanging the photos too high!