Creative ways to display photos in your home, office, or studio are a great method for showcasing your work and abilities. If you are a professional photographer, how to create a gallery display is also a wonderful sales tool.
Making physical prints and deciding how to display printed photos can generate interest in your work in general, open up alternative hirings or purchase besides what the client originally came in for, and are a great method for cementing in their mind that you are a talented photographer.
This is true whether you’re a working pro or just doing it all for fun as a talented photographer. Besides the possible sales tool, a gallery display of our images gives us an added level of enjoyment in this field we love so much.
When we’re thinking of how to display photos, we may first think of our web and social media presence. Online galleries are a very important aspect of promoting our art, but a physical photo gallery adds personal involvement to viewers of our images.
What Size Prints?
The size of the enlargements we make as physical prints is one of the primary concerns for how to create a gallery display. Too small and people won’t be able to see from any appreciable distance. Too big and the images might be overwhelming.
What helps make the decision concerning print size is the space available on the wall for mounting prints. By wall, we can also include free-standing display racks such as you might use in an arts and crafts fair or a traveling photography gallery tour.
Generally speaking, the more blank space available, the larger the enlargement we can use. An odd thing about sizing is that a print that seems huge as we’re holding it on delivery. Might still seem very small once it’s on a wall space. The size of any furniture also impacts the apparent size by comparison.
A tabletop or desktop array is another idea for how to display printed photos. The sizes for a display like this might be smaller overall than a typical wall gallery, but empty space is again a good criterion for deciding how big or small to go.
What Media for Display?
Choosing the media used for the prints is an interesting part of how to create a gallery display. Matting and framing paper prints can look beautiful, but two options I really enjoy are canvas prints and metal prints.
Canvases sometimes become part of the artwork themselves, which works great for certain images we may have. Metal prints have the great quality of showcasing the image itself as the entirety of the artwork, with no frames, mattes, or stretchers competing for attention.
Large metal prints of our best images have an instant impact on viewers since all that a person sees is the image. A metal print won’t flex, sag, wrinkle, or bend like some other media may, so these make perfect enlargements for our gallery displays.
One of my favorite online printers for metal enlargements is Metal Mount Prints. They are an online printer based in Kansas City that lets you upload your image files as either TIFFs or JPEGs or you can transfer files from Dropbox, Google Drive, or from email.
The sizes of enlargements available from Metal Mouth Prints are from 4x6” all the way to 40x60” which is 3 ½ x 5 feet! Choose from multiple sizes or get a custom-size metal print made.
They don’t do any extra color correction like some firms do, so you don’t need to worry about your careful post-processing work being changed by an automatic setting or a technician unfamiliar with your art.
How Many Prints?
How many prints is another thing to decide when considering how to create a gallery display of our own photographs.
We have multiple options here as well. We can have a photo mosaic of many small prints that fit together to make a whole, we can have multiple sizes of various images, or we can decide on a few prints in a larger size.
Many art galleries will have artwork of various sizes displayed, so we have that option for our own images. Having the same sizes but some images portrait view and others landscape is yet another option from which to choose.
Other Tips and Ideas
One of the more creative ways to display photos is made possible by the éZi mount system of display. This system allows you to quickly change out images or where they are placed within the gallery.
Lighting is another variable to consider when creating a gallery display. Options include diffused lighting, direct lights focused on the images, window light, or track lighting. All of these factors are part of how to create a gallery display of our own photographic images that will create an impact with our viewers.
Learn More:
- What Types of Images Look Best on a Metal Print?
- Metal Print Buyer's Guide
- Learn & Explore: All About Metal Prints