I am a firm believer in family portraits, and displaying those portraits. I am one of those crazy people with framed pictures all over my living room shelves and I have a hard time taking one down when a new one is available. I had a gallery years ago, but those too get bigger and bigger as new items arrive. Regardless of how you display your pictures, I want to encourage you to make sure you are doing it. Some of you don’t understand because you too love your portraits, but there is a whole group of people who don’t like this concept. They feel that it’s unnecessary, or too expensive, or time consuming, or a major project. For those people, here is the very harsh bottom reason why you need to do this: MEMORIES. You need to preserve the memory of your kids, your spouse, yourself (YES YOU TOO!), your mother, mother-in-law, cousins, aunts, etc…while you are all young. Trust me you don’t want your last picture of your recently passed parent to be from when your first born was a toddler! Not only will you want a beautiful portrait of that parent, but so will your children. You will regret not taking more pictures- trust me! Start getting an annual portrait will family now- I beg of you!

The other consideration is taking family selfies and printing those out and creating a scrapbook. This is a fantastic way to get the kids involved with making a family photo album/tree, and you can do this as often as you’d like. Additionally there are so many services available that you can upload the photos to make a more professionally printed book. My favorites are Shutterfly for memory books and Chatbooks for Instagram.

How to Style your Family Portraits…

Gallery Wall

For how to set up a gallery for your family portraits, check out the patterns that Pottery Barn’s blog offers.

Check out the full post on how to style a gallery by Pottery Barn here

Bookshelf Styling

The other option is book shelf styling. You should have a variety of frames and sizes, but keep them the same color. Adjust their heights and add a few to each shelf. I personally like to style different pictures from the same shoot together. Once you have your pictures in place, start placing your decor : books, knick-knacks, word signs, etc in between and around (or even underneath!) your frames. I chose items that blended well with the theme and colors of my portraits. And Voila! a well curated picture collection.