How to hang a gallery wall without the guesswork

Most gallery walls go wrong before the first nail. You buy the frames, lean them against the wall, eyeball "yeah, kind of like that" — and three weekends later there are eight extra holes nobody can explain.

Here's a 6-step process we use at HangPlanner. It works for 3 frames, it works for 20. The whole point: decide on paper (or screen), drill once.

1. Measure your wall first, not your frames

Walk over with a tape measure. Width × height in centimetres, plus where the skirting starts, where the light switch is, the height of the sofa or sideboard underneath. Write it down. This is the canvas.

Open HangPlanner, pick your country (it sets sensible defaults — 350 × 240 cm for AU/UK living rooms, taller for the US), and key in your actual numbers.

2. Add frames at real-world sizes

Don't trust "this looks about A3" — measure the outer dimensions of every frame you own. Width × height in cm. Drop them into the canvas. Now you can see the actual footprint before anything touches the wall.

Bonus: if you're shopping, pull frames from our Popular Frames library — IKEA Ribba 50×70, Kmart 40×50, etc. Real dimensions, real hole positions for the hooks.

3. Establish the eye-line first

Gallery wall design has one rule that beats everything else: the visual centre of the group sits at average eye height (~150 cm). Not the centre of the wall. Not the centre of the sofa. Eye height.

In HangPlanner, drop a horizontal Laser Level line at 150 cm. Arrange your frames so their visual mass straddles that line — bigger frames a little below, smaller ones above. The eye does the rest.

4. Spacing: keep it tight

5–8 cm between frames. Tighter than you think. Pieces with more than ~10 cm gap read as separate works, not a group. Pieces with less than ~3 cm look crammed.

HangPlanner shows the live gap between frames as you drag. When two frames snap to 6 cm, the canvas glows green for a beat — that's the sweet spot.

5. Rough-in with paper before drilling

This is the step everyone skips. Don't. Print the 1:1 install template (📐 Export → InstallImg), tape it to the wall at the right height, step back. Live with it for an hour. Walk past it. Sit on the couch. Then mark the nail positions through the template.

Templates are printed at 72 DPI actual size — 1 cm on the page is 1 cm on the wall. The nail-position dots are already drawn for you.

6. Drill, hang, breathe

Once the template's right, drilling is the easy part. Pre-drill into anchors if it's plasterboard. Use a level on every frame as you hang it — wonky frames undo the whole plan.

One more thing

The number-one regret we hear: "I wish I'd gone bigger." The wall almost always wants a piece 20–30% larger than feels safe in the store. Plan it on a screen first; you'll see it immediately.

Try it free: open the planner. No signup needed for the Demo wall — sketch your room in 5 minutes, see if it changes your mind.