We all take an enormous number of photos.
Birthdays. Holidays. First day of school. Last day of school. Christmas mornings. Sunday walks. Random Tuesday afternoons when the dog fell asleep in a position that didn’t appear anatomically possible.
Taking them isn’t the problem.
Actually doing something with them is where most of us fall down.
So, if you’ve been meaning to get some of your favourite family photos off your phone and into your home, we’ve pulled together some inspiration. Not rules, because nobody needs rules for displaying a photo of their own children, but ideas you can pinch, adapt and make your own.
Here are 9 ways families display their memories, from beautifully organised gallery walls to the good old family fridge.
The wall alongside a staircase is almost made for family photographs.
Rather than trying to squeeze everything into a neat rectangle, you can follow the angle of the stairs and let the collection gradually grow upwards.
It’s particularly good if you have a mixture of photos from different stages of family life. Wedding photos can sit alongside new babies, first days of school, holidays, grandparents, teenagers and whatever other evidence you have that everyone once willingly posed for photographs.
You don’t need to fill the entire wall immediately either. Start with a handful of favourites and add to them over time.
A few tips:
One day you might realise you’ve accidentally created a family timeline all the way upstairs.
There are worse things to have on a wall.
If “casual gallery wall” sounds suspiciously like “pictures that aren’t straight”, a grid might be more your thing.
Choose four, six or nine photographs, keep them the same size and arrange them with equal spacing.
Simple.
A grid works particularly well when the photographs themselves are quite different. You could combine a beach holiday, Christmas morning, a baby photo and the dog covered in mud, and the repeating shape will still make everything look like it belongs together.
There are plenty of ways to choose the pictures too:
Square prints are particularly good for this because they make creating an even grid ridiculously easy.
Almost disappointingly easy, really.
Now for the opposite approach.
Different sizes. Different orientations. Different photographs. Possibly different decades.
A mixed gallery wall can feel much more like a collection that has grown with your family rather than something you ordered as a complete set.
The trick is to have something connecting it all. That might be similar colours, black and white photography, consistent spacing or simply a strong central picture with everything else arranged around it.
Older photographs work brilliantly here too.
Bring in pictures of grandparents, childhood photos of the parents, wedding pictures and old family holidays alongside the newer stuff.
Suddenly it isn’t just a photo wall. It’s a little family archive.
And yes, there will almost certainly be a hairstyle in there that somebody would rather remained in the past.
That’s half the fun.
Not ready to commit to twelve holes in the wall?
Fair.
A shelf, mantelpiece or picture ledge lets you lean photographs against the wall instead. You can overlap different sizes, mix photographs with ornaments and move everything around whenever you fancy a change.
This is particularly useful for family photographs because the collection is never really finished.
New baby? Add a photo.
Great holiday? Swap one in.
Child suddenly announces that the photograph you’ve lovingly displayed for three years is “really embarrassing”? Move it to a more prominent position.
A ledge also works well if you like changing photographs seasonally. Summer holiday pictures can come out during the warmer months, Christmas photographs in December and old family favourites can stay all year round.
Not every family photo display needs to be worthy of an interiors magazine.
Sometimes the best one is the fridge.
School photographs. Holiday snaps. Photo booth strips. A picture your child printed at school. That photo of Grandma laughing that nobody can remember taking. A postcard. A slightly battered drawing. A magnet from Tenerife in 2017.
Individually, none of it matches.
Together, it’s your family.
There is something particularly nice about displaying photos in the kitchen because it’s somewhere everyone actually spends time. You’re not carefully arranging photographs in a room nobody enters. You’re sticking your memories right in the middle of everyday life.
You can do the same thing with a corkboard or magnetic noticeboard if your fridge isn’t magnetic or you’ve recently bought one of those very beautiful refrigerators that apparently objects to having a Year 3 school photo stuck to the front of it.
The point isn’t to make it perfect.
Quite the opposite.
More isn’t always better.
Sometimes there is one photograph that deserves to be the main event.
Maybe it’s the family photo where, by some extraordinary alignment of the planets, everybody is looking in the right direction.
Maybe it’s a wedding photograph.
Maybe it’s a completely unplanned holiday shot that somehow captured everyone exactly as you remember them.
Instead of surrounding it with other pictures, print that one larger and give it some space.
A single statement photograph works particularly well:
And because you’re only choosing one photograph, this is technically the simplest option.
Apart from the small matter of choosing one photograph from the 4,000 on your phone.
We’ll leave that bit with you.
Your memories don’t all have to be photographs.
A family display can include pictures alongside other bits and pieces you’ve collected over the years.
Mixing items with photographs can turn a wall or shelf into something much more personal.
A photo from your first family holiday next to the postcard you bought there means more than either would on its own. A wedding photograph beside an invitation or handwritten note immediately gives it another layer of history. You can still frame them for that added touch.
Think:
There isn’t really a formula.
If it means something to your family, it qualifies.
This is a very useful trick if you’ve got photographs taken at different times, on different cameras and in completely different lighting.
Turn them black and white.
Suddenly the professional wedding photograph, the phone snap from last summer and the picture of your parents from 1984 can happily live next to one another.
Black and white removes some of the visual differences between photographs, which makes a mixed collection feel much more consistent.
It’s particularly effective for:
It also has the convenient ability to make an ordinary phone photo look approximately 37% more artistic.
We haven’t scientifically verified that figure.
You don’t need an enormous empty wall.
Some of the nicest family photo displays happen in the little spaces you pass every day.
A couple of photographs on a bedside table. Three along a hallway. A favourite family picture on your desk. Photos on the mantelpiece. One beside the kitchen table.
These aren’t necessarily the places you’d photograph for an interiors magazine.
But they’re the places where you’ll actually see them.
Mantelpieces have been doing this job for generations, and there’s a reason. They’re already a natural focal point and they’re easy to update as new favourite photographs come along.
Getty’s archives even contain photographs of family sitting rooms from the 1940s with mantelpieces and walls absolutely covered in family pictures.
So if your mantelpiece currently contains seven family photos and nowhere sensible to put the remote, you’re not cluttered.
You’re continuing a long-standing tradition.
That’s probably the main thing we’ve learnt from looking at all these different approaches.
Some people want nine photographs in a mathematically perfect grid.
Some want an entire staircase full of memories.
Some have three carefully chosen pictures on a shelf.
Some have a fridge covered in photographs, school certificates, magnets and a takeaway menu they haven’t ordered from since 2022.
They all work.
The important bit isn’t really how you arrange your photographs.
It’s getting the ones that matter out of your phone and putting them somewhere you can actually see them.
Start with one favourite.
You can always build from there.
A metal print is a simple way to turn one of those favourite family photos into something made to be seen, rather than scrolled past.
Choose your photo, pick your size and we’ll take care of the rest.
