utah photography Archives - Lindsay Ross Blog

EIGHT Photo Display ideas for your home

I’ve been working REALLY hard the past year to take more photos of our every day lives, get our photos organized, backed up, documented, printed, and displayed.

I posted a series about how I’ve been doing this called “Picture Display Movement”.

I’ll be the first to admit it’s not easy and it certainly takes some time. BUT. It’s a HUGE priority for me so I’m making time. Scheduling time. And making things happen.

And now the walls of my home are filled with photographs that make my spirit happy. And remind my children they are loved. And remind our family of how amazing, funny, (and sometimes heartbreaking and disappointing) life can be.

Here are EIGHT different ideas (and a bonus at the bottom) on how to display photos in your own home to hopefully inspire some of you to get them printed and displayed.

{For suggestions on where to print your photos, click HERE}

And if you want some great tips on how to immediately improve your phone photography, enter your name and e-mail in the side margin and I’ll send you TEN free tips you’ll love.

ONE. Print your photos on matboard and display them on a shelf. I like doing non-traditional sizes for my matboard prints. This is 20×26.

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TWO. Get a series of pictures (these are all photos I took at Lake Powell–my happy place) and put them in frames to hang on the wall in a row (horizontally or vertically).

I hung these on the wall using Velcro. There’s a sticky side that sticks to the frame and a sticky side that sticks to the wall and then it Velcro’s together. Easiest way to make sure the pictures are level and in line with each other.

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THREE. Print on matboard and display it on an easel.

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FOUR. Put all your Instagram prints on a print (using Photoshop or other photo-editing software) and display in a frame on the wall.

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FIVE. Use various sizes of matboard prints (can you tell I LOVE matboard prints) and attach them directly to the wall. The large picture on the left is attached using velcro in all four corners and in the middle. The bottom 4 pictures have velcro on the top and are resting on the shelf on the bottom.

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SIX. Use magnet boards (these are from IKEA) and print off various sizes (4×6, 5×7, and a few 8×10–you could also do square prints) and attach them to the magnet board. I just have plain rectangular magnets but you could get cool fancy ones.

Every six months or so I print off new ones and rotate them in.

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SEVEN. One of my favorite wall displays. These are printed on standout boards (stick 1/2 ” out from the wall) but you could easily do this on matboard. These are a series of pictures from my Funbooth session. Just grouped them together.

EIGHT. Printed 16 random pictures at Persnickety Prints in 2×2 squares. Attached them to a wall by our toy room using Washi tape I bought at Target.

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For a BONUS wall display idea, click HERE and see what I did with hundreds of my 4×6 photos to make a super call wall display in my office.

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For more info on how to Organize, Print, and Display your photos, click HERE to read the Picture Display Movement series.

And if you want to stay up to date on future photo tips and other great life stuff, enter your e-mail and name in the sidebar (under “subscribe here”) to stay connected and get TEN free tips to improve your phone photography.

He couldn’t wait to get here.

Newborn shoots are easily one of my favorites. And now that I’m (hopefully) done having newborns, I get to enjoy them for a few hours and then give them back to their moms.

This little guy belongs to one of our family’s close friends, and people we really like to spend time with! He put his mom on bedrest for over a week and then decided to make an early appearance. He came EIGHT WEEKS early, landing himself a date with the NICU nurses for several weeks.

Modern medicine saved his life. So thankful I live in a time when we have SO many resources to save lives.

Welcome to the world little man. You obviously couldn’t wait to get here. And we’re glad to have you.

It never gets old.

Sometimes if we’re having a particularly grumpy day, we have the Monday blues, or we just need a good laugh, we play around on the Photo Booth on my computer.

I die laughing every time.
It never gets old.

Enthusiastic about Life

A man I had just met for the first time told me I was “enthusiastic about life”.

He was right. I am, most of the time.

And thankfully, Mya seems to have inherited my enthusiasm for life and put it on steroids. This girl LOVES life. She smiles as though her face may burst. She takes her sweet time in everything she does (which can sometimes be maddening, but usually reminds me to slow the heck down).

She does her own thing and doesn’t need other people to validate her. She takes things as they come. Care-free. Kind. Full of laughter.

She tells stories better than anyone I know.

And she makes the best faces.

Man, I love her. My “enthusiastic about life” buddy!

Picture Display Movement. Step 4. PRINT

{Click the links for Step 1, Step 2, or Step 3 if you missed any of the previous posts}

Ah. The step that seems to give me the most trouble. Well, at least it used to. Cause things are changing around here. And I already have a good start.

I take loads of pictures. I get them on my computer. And now I have them all organized. But what a bummer if it ends there. What’s the point of taking them if no one ever gets to see them? All those memories, emotions, and STORIES of our lives sit on a hard drive and remain untold. And add to my mom-guilt that is already never ending.

So one of my bigger priorities this year is to print and display the pictures I take of our family. In albums, and other forms of display.

When deciding what to print, I start with the END in mind. I do this before I even take some of the pictures I take. What is the point of taking this picture? What story am I trying to tell? And how am I going to share it? Will it be on the wall? The magnet board? In a slideshow? Or a photo album?

Let’s start with just basic prints for a photo album. I have recently discovered a new way for displaying my photos. It’s called Project Life. And I’m kind of obsessed because it is exactly what I’ve been looking for. (You can visit the website here)

But let’s talk printing for just any photo album OR a photo book you can create online through Blurb or Shutterfly or similar companies.

Here’s a quick and easy way (because those are my most important criteria in pretty much everything these days) to pick the pictures you want to print.

Since I’m still playing “catch up”, here’s how I’m doing it right now.

In iPhoto, I clicked on the folder for 2013 ( I’m starting with the most recent and working my way backwards.) All the pictures from 2013 show up in my screen. I started at the top and scrolled through the pictures. I click on the pictures I want to print and “flag” them.

See how some of those pictures have a little orange flag in the top left corner. To “flag” a picture, you select it (you can select multiple pictures by clicking on one, then clicking on another while holding the “command” key) and then click “flag” at the bottom left of the screen.

Once I scrolled through the whole year, I clicked on the “Flagged” tab on the left of the screen so I can see all the pictures I have flagged.

It also tells you how many photos you have flagged. So for 2013 I have 1103 pictures I want to print.

The next step is to select all those pictures that I flagged and put them in a folder on my desktop. Click on the first picture, hold down Shift and click on the last picture to select them all. Then drag and drop them into a folder. My folder is labeled “TO PRINT“.

Once I have them in the folder, I do a quick edit on those pictures. And by quick edit, I mean quick. I don’t spend hours editing photos. Because if I do, they’ll never get printed. I know this about me. It has to be simple. It has to be quick. It’s just the way I work.

Once edited, I upload them for printing. I’ll have to do this in batches so it doesn’t feel as expensive.

My plan is to stay current with the year I’m on, and add in photos from previous years until I have them all printed. But I have to stay current with this year so I don’t just keep falling further and further behind.

So at the end of January, I will print January’s pictures using this process. I will also print a bundle of the photos from last year. Previous years pictures will go into a Project Life album in no particular order. I just want them where we can see them. Just gettin’ it done.

But the current year will go into albums according to month.

I will have a date set to print pictures each month and a date set to put those pictures in the Project Life albums. Scheduling a consistent and regular time to organize and print photos is more important to me than just about anything else I can schedule.

Step 4. Print those pictures!!!

{To see my suggestions on where to Print pictures, both for an album and for display in other ways in the home, go to this post.}

{To learn more about Project Life, check out my post here for the physical products, or here to learn how to use the Project Life APP, or go to the Project Life website here}

On to Step 5. Displaying your photos.

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