Free Virtual Gallery Wall Designer
So you want to do a gallery wall! How fun! This is a great way to display your treasured photos, mementos, and family portraits. We recently added a gallery wall to our family room and we love how much personality it adds to our home. When planning the layout of the wall, there are many options on how to do so. You can use painter’s tape to outline your frames onto the actual wall or you can lay your frames on the floor and reorganize them that way. However, with all the technology available, I went all digital! In this post, I’ll show you how to do your own virtual gallery wall design and give you access to my FREE template!
Take a photo of the space where you want your gallery wall
Be sure to capture the whole wall, including a little of the ceiling and anything else that is on the wall or nearby. This way, you can look at the spacing and centering of your gallery wall.
Use Canva to design your wall
Go to canva.com or the Canva app and click “Create a Design”. Choose a canvas that best matches your photo, either landscape or portrait. Then upload your photo of the blank wall and drag it to the blank design.
Add in picture frames
Once you have your blank wall uploaded, it’s time to add in your picture frames so you can play around with layout! To do this, click “Elements” on the left-hand panel. Then click “Frames”. Add the frames that match the orientation of your photos and resize to get a general idea of the frames you’ll be adding to your actual wall. Unfortunately, you really can’t make the frames true to scale, but you can get a general idea of orientation and relative size. For example, you can make squares or rectangles to represent 9×9 vs. 8×10, respectively.
Upload your actual photos to the virtual frames
By now, you should have an idea of the photos and items that will make up your gallery wall. Now it’s time to figure out the layout. Do you like these two photos together? Would maybe this photo look better? The best part about this virtual gallery wall designer is that you can move around the frames over and over again without breaking a sweat! Then, once you have the layout perfected, you can hit “Download” on the top right and you’re done!
With this, there’s no need to deal with stubborn painter’s tape to outline frames on the wall. Or deal with frames on the floor as you gingerly step around them to change up a layout. Having this virtual gallery wall designer through Canva makes planning the layout sweet and simple. Once you have your layout, it’s time to gather all of your materials, such as frames and photo prints. Because you did the layout, you already have a general idea of frame sizes and how many you need to get of each.
Follow the rest of the step-by-step instructions on how to finish your DIY gallery wall! I can’t wait to see it!
To help get you started with your virtual gallery wall designer, here is my FREE template for you to play around with!
TIP TO GET CORRECT PROPORTIONS: When you click “create a design,” enter custom dimensions of your wall space in *centimeters* to represent inches. NOTE: This is NOT a conversion of inches to centimeters — we are simply using cm to represent inches. When you add the photo element, you can drag the size of the object to the correct scale (using centimeters to represent inches). So for example, my wall space was 100″ x 60″. I created a custom size 100cm x 60cm. And then for a 24″ x 36″ photo for example, I made the image size 24cm x 36cm (the box won’t show “cm,” it will just show as 24×36). This worked out perfectly for me, and I hope it helps others!
What a clever thing! Quick question, I’ve subscribed in order to get the designer but I have not recieved it. Any help would be great!
I did mine by eyeballing it and this would have helped me so much! Will have to save for when we move and need to do another one! Thanks for sharing.
This is so smart! I use Canva all the time and it never occurred to me to use it for a gallery wall planner. How clever.
That is a really cool idea!! Thank you SO much..i use canva all day and i never thought of this.
It turned out very pretty! Love all the screenshots, that’s so helpful <3
I never thought to use canva! Thanks!