How to Layout a Gallery Wall in a Long Hallway

I love what this homeowner has done to her hallway so far. Dark paint on the ceiling with those cool pendants and beautiful wood flooring is such a great look here.

Now, she wants to do a gallery wall of family photos, but this wall is over 16’ long and she doesn’t know where to start.

I’m going to run through two ways I have done gallery walls, one with exacting measurements, and one (or more) with a more random approach.

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Full view looking down long hallway with a wall meant for a family photo gallery.

A Gallery Wall With Exact Measurements

I had a project where the homeowner wanted to frame up some of their travel photos from trips they took with their kids when they lived overseas. This was sort of a last installation of some final things in their home, and they had a clean, more modern style. I didn’t really want to frame these up and hang them haphazardly in this room, their breakfast room, which was in the open, main part of the home.

I wanted to end up with a perfectly lined up rectangular perimeter, but with different sizes for each photo frame. Oh, and to make it even harder on myself, I didn’t want any kind of grid where each frame was the same size. :-/

I had two of these blue cabinets in the breakfast room that we were hanging the gallery wall above. I didn’t want to have the photos bleed over the sides of the cabinets and I knew the approximate height I wanted the overall gallery to be.

Blue metal cabinets, 36” w x 33” high.

I blocked out the elevation of the wall with the two cabinets. Then I determined an approximate size overall that I wanted the rectangular shape to be. I ended up with 4’-9” high x 5’-6” wide. At this point, the dimensions were flexible until I fine tuned which photos and the size of the framing.

I left about 9” above the console, which is about what I always do for art above a piece of furniture like this. You can see this fills the space nicely.

I wanted to use standard photo print sizes, to make getting the photos printed easier for my client, 3.5’ x 5”, 5x7”, 8” x 10” and 9” x 12”. I wanted to do pretty big mats, as I feel like they look more like art that way.

When it came to selecting the photos, I picked a few that I thought would look great large and some that would be good as smaller sized. I wanted a random mix.

I came up with some frame sizes that would work with those print sizes, giving a nice sized mat, and then played with the arrangement of boxes, to come up the best format. I did a bunch of overlays, in sketches, to see what appealed. We did custom framing on these because getting the perimeter to all align meant that there were some unique sizes on some of the frames.

This was the mix that I liked the best and I worked it all out to the inch! (I have to say, this fried my brain a little bit!)

I was so happy with the end result though!

The dark frames provided some punctuation and consistency to the gallery. It was a slightly random-but-tightly-unified look. :-)

I’m not sure I’d do this kind of installation again or I’d recommend tackling it this way. It was rather tedious.

So, here’s another option and one that I would recommend for the long, 16’ hallway wall in the question at the top of this post.

Gallery Wall With No Defined Perimeter

This is what I did in my own bedroom a year or so ago. I had this artwork collected but hadn’t huing it up or framed it yet. I knew I would be spending some time in my bedroom recuperating from my knee replacement this past year, so I decided to get to it and get this wall up!

We had the frame tv installed the year prior and I chose the white frame for it, as I knew I’d be framing the artwork I had in white frames, to pop off my light green wall color.

It makes me so happy to see these colorful pieces on my wall, all framed in white. It is such a cheery room.

I do like a gallery wall with all kinds of objects, artwork and frames, with different sizes, colors and finishes, etc. In my home, however, I like a little more consistency. Framing a gallery wall in all the same type and color of frame and mat, can get you a look that is a little less “maximalist” and a bit cleaner overall.

Now for the 16’ Hallway Wall!

There is an easier way to approach this, and that is to start off with the exact frames that you want to use. I looked at these from Pottery Barn, as I think they’d work great on this wall. I think the wood will warm up the white walls and wood frames look good with either color or black and white photos.

They come in three sizes and have mats to fit standard sized photos.

So, with these three sizes in mind, I drew up the size of the wall to scale. Then I created a layout with those three sizes of frames.

I drew some center lines to establish the center of the wall and worked out from there, using the frames both horizontally and vertically. In this sketch I kept the frames about 4”-6” apart, I like not keeping it exactly consistent here.

I coded them on the diagram to give you an idea of how it could spread out and how many to buy. I think this looks good for this size of wall and would work well for a photo gallery.

A - 11” x 17” frame, B - 9” x 11” frame, C - 10” x 10” f rame

You can see there is room to add more, if you want. I wouldn’t do much less or the overall wall area won’t be as filled up.

So, go all in and get to hanging those photos!

I hope she sends a pic when she’s done. :-)

Check out these posts that have some family photos gallery walls too!

This blogpost was thoughtfully written by me, Carla Aston, and not by AI, ghostwriters, or guest posters.