February 2015

One of the best ways to help your apartment or townhouse feel more like home is to print and decorate with your family photos. We’ve rounded up a few tips to get you started:

• What types of photos should you use? Anything that makes you happy! Your kids’ school portraits, old photos of relatives long gone, that silly selfie your 4 year old captured on your phone while you were in the shower. Don’t forget a photo of yourself with your loved ones. You deserve a little wall space too!
• Quality counts – if you have digital photos you’d like to get printed, go to a professional-grade lab, not a chain store. Locally, we recommend Lumiere Photo; online, Mpix.com is a great site that offers quality printing services.
• If it’s time to update your family photos, consider hiring a full-service professional photographer. Your photographer can guide you through designing a beautiful gallery wall of cohesive images, and even take care of printing and framing for you.
• This website offers some great tips on how to create a stunning gallery wall in your home. The guide shown here is particularly handy for figuring out what size photos to print and hang.
• Worried about getting your photos to hang as neat and tidy as if they were in a museum? Here are two different methods that work great.
• Want to print and frame some of your Instagram photos, but looking for a quick and easy way to do it? Try the app Instantly Framed, which allows you to easily order a printed, matted and framed photo from your Instagram account, which is then shipped to your home in 5 days!
• Are you getting backlogged and overwhelmed with the amount of photos you need to print? Try the smartphone app GrooveBook. You pay a $2.99 subscription fee, and in return get one photo album a month with up to 100 photos from your smartphone. You do have to upload the photos you want printed to the website, but the process is quite easy and seamless, and can be done totally from your phone. The $2.99 fee even covers shipping.

Don’t let your family memories languish on a hard drive – start printing and decorating with them today! When hanging photos in Elmwood Manor, just use appropriate hardware and ask before hanging anything heavier than a normal picture frame. Happy decorating!