How to make a gallery wall layout that fits your space

July 27, 2026

For most of us, our best photos are buried in our camera rolls. A photo gallery wall is how you get them off it and onto your walls for everybody to see. This guide walks through the eight steps of building a gallery wall from scratch, starting with a pile of photos and ending with a stunning wall display.

It's a fun weekend project if you have the floor space and the patience for it. And if the measuring-and-sketching phase sounds like more than what you’re up for, we'll also cover some shortcuts and DIY gallery wall hacks at the end: ready-to-hang gallery walls that arrive with a life-size hanging template, and our Gallery Wall Design Service, where our in-house team tackles some of the most challenging tasks for you.

8-step DIY process of how to make a gallery wall

Every good gallery wall starts as a collection of photos you’re proud of. The order of these steps matters more than you'd expect, because each one narrows the decisions in the next. Work through them in sequence and you'll never end up holding a beautiful frame you have nowhere to put.

1. Source all the photos you might want to frame

Cast a wide net. Dig through your camera roll, old hard drives, and the wedding photos you somehow never printed. Pull two to three times as many candidates as you think you'll hang, because it’s far easier to cut a great photo from a big pile than to go hunting for one more when your layout has a hole in it. While you're at it, check the resolution of your image files. A photo that looks crisp on a phone screen can fall apart at 16x20, and you'd rather find that out now than after you've built a layout around it.

2. Pick your desired wall and measure the real estate

Once you know roughly how many photos you want up, you'll have a much better sense of how much wall you need. Walk through your home and look at the usual suspects: above the sofa, up the staircase, down a hallway, the blank stretch behind the dining table.

Then measure, and measure honestly. The number you want is not the full width and height of the wall. It's the usable space left after everything else has its say. Subtract for furniture, door and window trim, light switches, thermostats, and air vents. Designers often suggest keeping an arrangement to roughly two-thirds the width of the furniture below it, which is a helpful starting point rather than a hard rule. Write your final usable dimensions down somewhere you won't lose them. Every decision from here depends on that number.

3. Choose your overall gallery wall shape and theme

Now that you know your photos and your desired wall, you get to the fun part. Your gallery wall decor should feel like it belongs in the room, so use what's already in there as your reference. Black frames with white mats read graphic and modern. Natural wood warms a space up. And if the room already has a lot going on, printing everything in black and white will help tone things down, while still maintaining cohesion..

Then pick a shape. Four options cover most picture frame wall ideas:

Grid or structured: equal sizes, equal spacing, extremely tidy
Staircase: follows the diagonal of your stairs
Offset or organic: varied sizes in a loose, “collected-over-time” arrangement
Centered anchor with satellites: one large hero piece with smaller frames orbiting it

Whichever you choose, give the collection a through-line. That can be the frames (one color, one style) or the photos (all wedding, all travel, all family portraits, all black and white treatment). Without a through-line, a wall of favorites reads as clutter. With one, it reads as a collection.

4. Sketch your ideal frame layout based on your wall measurements

Grab paper and sketch the wall to scale, including everything that intrudes on it. Take your wall and design around what's actually there, not around the layout you saw on Pinterest. Then start placing rectangles. Alignment is what separates a layout that looks deliberate from one that looks accidental, and you have two ideal choices:

Bottom and top aligned: this produces clean grids and structured arrangements
Middle aligned: where every frame shares one horizontal centerline, giving you the offset and organic look

There are other alignment options like top aligned only, bottom aligned only, etc. but those depend on your room. The two mentioned in the bullets above are the easiest options to tackle. Sketching also forces you to solve the awkward stuff early, because hanging picture frames in wall space that includes a thermostat, a sconce, or a sloped ceiling takes planning you do not want to be doing with a hammer in your hand.

5. Test your layout using painter's tape or paper the same size as your desired frames

Do not skip this one. Cut kraft paper or newspaper to the exact dimensions of the frames you're considering, or outline them with painter's tape, and put them on your wall. Suddenly the layout that looked perfectly balanced on paper is 6 inches too low, or the whole thing is quietly drifting left. Move the cutouts around until it stops bugging you, then leave them up for a day or two. Moving a piece of tape costs you nothing. Patching a hole costs you a Saturday.

6. Order your frames

Once the paper mockup stops bothering you, you have your sizes and your gallery wall layout. Before you order, think about hardware, because it changes what you should buy. Nails hold more weight and stay where you put them, but they leave holes. Damage-free adhesive strips are the move for renters and tricky plaster walls, but they cap out at a certain weight, which pushes you toward lighter frames and smaller sizes.

Our Classic frames hang from a single metal center hanger and let you supply your own nails and level, which is part of how they stay affordable. Our Luxe frames use a two-point, no-wire hanging system and arrive with the nails, hardware, and a mini-level right in the box. Classic Wall frames start at $59 and are made with a removable backing, so you can swap photos out as new life milestones are unlocked. Luxe Wall frames start at $79, made with premium museum-quality materials and a sealed paper backing, so your photos are preserved for decades.

It’s worth noting that if you’re looking for renter-friendly solutions, Classic frames are the way to go because they’re compatible with damage-free adhesive strips. Never use adhesives on Luxe frames because it can damage the sealed paper backing that preserves your photos.

7. Lay frames out on the floor first based on your desired layout

When your frames arrive, resist the urge to start hammering. Clear a patch of floor roughly the size of your wall and build the arrangement there first, matching your paper mockup. This is your last easy chance to swap two photos, rotate a frame, or admit that the small one in the corner isn't earning its spot. Set your spacing now with a tape measure, keep it consistent, and know that 2-3 inches between frames is a common starting point. Then take a photo of the finished floor layout with your phone. You will absolutely want it as a reference when you're balanced on a step stool.

8. Hang up your frames

Start in the middle and work outward. Your anchor piece goes up first, and every frame after that references it, which keeps small errors from compounding across the wall. Use a level on every single frame and check your spacing as you go rather than at the end. Many designers center an arrangement at eye level, around 57 inches from the floor, though you should adjust for your ceiling height and whatever furniture sits below. Step back every few frames to check the whole picture. Then hang the last one, put the hammer down, and take a good look at memories that finally live somewhere other than your pocket.

Easier solutions for bringing your own gallery wall to life

The DIY route is satisfying, and there's real pleasure in doing it yourself. But the measuring, sketching, and mocking-up is where most gallery walls stall out and stay in the box. We built two solutions around that, and both land you in the same place with a fraction of the planning time.

1. Order ready-to-hang layouts that come with a gallery wall template

Our Classic and Luxe gallery walls consist of pre-designed layouts where the sizing, spacing, and proportions are already solved. You pick the arrangement based on what fits on your wall, upload your photos, and we send the whole thing framed and ready to go.

This is the hack that skips steps 4 through 7 entirely: every Classic and Luxe gallery wall arrives with a life-size printed gallery wall template. Tape it to the wall, hammer through the required spots, peel the paper off, and hang. No sketching, no newsprint cutouts, no unnecessary holes, and most people have theirs up in under an hour. Here's how to use our Classic gallery wall template in four simple steps and how to use our Luxe gallery wall template in six easy steps.

One note: our Canvas and Metal gallery walls do not include a template, so if the template is the selling point, stick with Classic or Luxe.

Classic Galleries start at $198 and include layouts like the Classic Stack II, Classic Grid, Classic Staircase, and Classic Hallway. Luxe Galleries start at $638 and bring high-end editorial arrangements to life, like the viral Luxe Bricklay and Luxe Vertical Grid, hung from two points for perfect leveling.

2. Work with our in-house design team to design a custom gallery wall

If your wall is an odd shape where nothing standard fits or you'd rather have someone else do the measuring and guesswork, our Gallery Wall Design Service puts our in-house designers on the job. They'll collaborate with you through steps 2 to 5 so you can land on a shape and theme that feels uniquely yours, and then our team will design a layout around your actual photos and your actual wall. You get a one-of-a-kind arrangement without doing any of the hard geometry yourself. Worth knowing: because every one of these is built from scratch, custom galleries designed this way don't come with a gallery wall template, so step 7 is still encouraged.

Ready to design your own gallery wall?

The best gallery wall isn't the one with the most expensive frames. It's the one that actually made it onto the wall. Every step here exists for that reason, whether you get there with painter's tape and a free weekend or with a template and half an hour. Your photos have been waiting long enough.

Explore ready-to-hang gallery walls at Frameology. Not sure we're the right fit? Here's why Frameology is the best online framing service.