Family photo galleries are timeless. There’s something special about walking into someone’s home and seeing dozens of family images adorning their walls. After all, photos speak volumes about a family’s story! Each image is a unique piece of family legacy. Here’s how to create a unique family photo gallery in your own home, courtesy of gifted photographer and creative visionary, Lena Hyde. Her tips will help you create a photo-filled space that inspires you and your visitors to save family photos for future generations.

As a photographer, a traveler and an Instagram lover, I create and amass many photographs. Each year, I take time to make custom photo albums in order to keep up with my growing family and all of our adventures. Yet there are still so many photos I want to see more often – on our walls!

Here’s how I tackled this fun family photo project, step-by-step:

1. Choose a Room Without a View. Sounds funny, right? But it works! I specifically chose our family dining room for a gallery because, let’s be honest, it’s a fairly simple room without much adornment other than classic wainscoting. Since the dining area’s color palette is lavender, black, white and cream, I opted to display all black and white photos, which produced a clean, classic result. Keeping the images continually black and white also unifies the space and showcases faces beautifully.
2. Select Picture-Perfect Frames. My next step was carefully measuring my space, which revealed an abundance of linear surface areas and tall ceilings. After measuring, I concluded that vertical frames would really help optimize the display and give me more bang for my photo buck! So, I ordered black “Bella” frames from the Design Aglow Frame Shop, a “Grab and Go” gallery (#5), a set of a set of (3) 24×30, and a set of (3) 16×20 frames for a clean look – remember, keeping your display minimalist is important for unifying photos in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Many modern black frames, paired with white mats and black and white prints quickly brought everything together in an appealing way.
3. Select Picture-Perfect Photos: To select the best family photos for my project, I crafted collages from places we’ve visited over the years. Since the final result was hundreds of photos taken in various seasons, years and locations, I simply converted all of the images to black and white for a crisp, consistent look. My artistic OCD was quite satisfied with the perfect unity! Now our fun family trips to Barcelona, London, Colorado, Alaska and San Francisco are all featured prominently in our dining room.
4. Use Your Words: For the sake of added nostalgia, many of the photo collages include verbiage: names and dates of the places we visited as a family. In order to keep the gallery clutter-free, though, the small 8×10 images are showcased sans captions. I love the resulting display.
5. Keep Installation Simple (and fast!) All of the photos were professionally printed by one of my favorite labs – ProDPI. The white mats that were included helped me create a truly gallery-quality display in our dining room. As an added bonus, the very simple framing system enabled me to install the collages very quickly. In fact, it just took about 5 minutes per frame! Finally, to maximize my time, I  arranged the photos on our wall ledge by marking two lines on the wall over each frame. Then, I only had to use two nails and simply set the frames on top of them. Of course, this means there’s ample space to slide frames left or right on the nail heads without adding extra holes.

That’s how I created a family photo gallery in our own home, in under an hour! One of the best results of my project is that a room that was once lackluster has become a favorite spot to hang out and reminisce together about our shared family experiences. Since photos are a perfect conversation starter for families, I think they’re ideal for dining areas and living rooms. My family loves looking at these photos and talking about our old adventures, as well as ones we will add to the gallery in the future. If you ask me, that’s a picture-perfect outcome!

About the author: 

Since 1995, Lena Hyde has been transforming the way her clients view photography through her stunning philosophy of life as art, and by creating memories of childhood and family that will be treasured for a lifetime.
Through her extraordinary portraiture, Lena shares a knack for relating to her subjects and creates a truly enjoyable experience. She is also the creator of Design Aglow, a leading design and business success resource for portrait and wedding photography studios.