How to Hang a Photo Gallery Wall

I love my sister-in-law's gallery wall and finally attempted a little one myself. Some photo walls I like and others I don't, so I'd been trying to figure out how to approach a photo wall without it looking cluttered. My neighbor and I were talking over her photo wall and I was so impressed she was taking on a project I've been meaning to tackle as well. So I finally got all the frames out since it's my "day off" and I'd decided to focus on our home. Here's how it went down: 

I . . . 

looked at a lot of Pinterest photo wall examples, 

laid my frames out on the floor to create a shape I liked, 

took a photo of what I had laid out to reference, 

measured the width and height of my layout, 

measured the wall to center my layout, 

drew lines on the wall with a pencil, 

started hanging photos starting with the center one and working my way out, using pencil marks with each frame to mark the top of the frame and the nail point beneath it, 

tried to stay alive as the boys tried to pull me backwards off my step stool,

and spent time surfing Amazon Prime  wallet-sized photo frames with plans to sprinkle a few little baby frames around the edges for fun. 

One thing I've observed--and this is just my opinion, but I think gallery walls work well when you keep the frames really close together, especially if you have a lot of them. The wider the spaces between the frames, the more cluttered and interrupted it feels. If you keep everything close you can create one big modern blob-shape instead of a speckled wall of individual frames that don't have a strong relationship with each other. It's also easier to keep the frames generally straight; they can't get too crooked without running into their neighbor frames. Symmetry can also be boring; the blob keeps your eyes moving around the pool of pictures. 

Observation 2: Keeping a consistent amount of space between the frames is also more feng shui; when looking at some Pinterest examples I noticed the gallery walls with random spacing between frames (2" here, 5" there, 1" here, etc.) look a little messy. Definitely lay out your photos before hanging to figure out what fits where.