
A wall of travel photos.
Displaying a travel photo wall in my apartment with Artifact Uprising square prints and Urban Outfitters photo clips.
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I take a lot of photos on my travels, as most people do. OK, no, I probably take about a million times more photos on my travels than most people do… But anyways. One thing I always planned on, when getting an apartment of my own, was to somehow display my travel photos. 8×10 prints? Canvases? Room-sized posters? Life-sized cardboard cutouts of all the hot foreign guys with hot foreign accents I met? I wasn’t sure (but, OK, that last one might have been slightly creepy). In any case, I knew I wanted to display my memories on a wall of travel photos, somehow, somewhere. I mean, what more inspiration do I need to get back on the road someday than to surround myself with my travel photos? What more inspiration do I need than to surround myself with the memories of my trip? Because I have a lot of awesome memories from my trip.
I went ten months in my apartment (have I really lived here ten months?) without putting up any photos. So, determined to get something up on my walls, I went through every blog post I wrote over the past four years, saved my favorites, and came out with a folder of about 350 or so photos I wanted to print. News flash: that’s a lot of photos. Obviously there was no way I was going to be able to print 350 photos to hang on my walls. I don’t have the wall space, or the budget, for that many. But there was also no way I was going to narrow those down to just a handful of 8×10 prints or one or two poster-sized prints.
I thought about buying some gallery frames and hanging a bunch ina travel gallery wall, but my plaster walls don’t seem to do well with heavy frames… So when I found these Henna Medallion photo clips at Urban Outfitters, I was hit with inspiration. The Urban Outfitters photo clips were long enough to hold a lot of photos, I had the perfect expanse of wall space for a few rows, and they had some cute boho clips that would go well in my living room. Plus, there were all the holiday sales last month. Enough said.
I printed 50 travel photos at Artifact Uprising: two sets of their square print sets. The 5″x5″ prints are on a thick matte paper with a white border — so they look really nice even without frames. And I managed to hang 30 of the Artifact Uprising square prints on the travel photo wall in my living room (the hanging sets came with 12 clips each, but, in the space I had, I had to take out two from each).
It was still incredibly hard to narrow down all my photos to just the 50 and harder still to narrow those 50 down to 30. But I love the way these prints look on my wall and find myself staring at them every day, remembering where in the world I was and the story behind each of them. Plus I have the twenty extra that I can swap out any time I want. (I actually was going to hang more over the desk in my bedroom, but the crumbly walls were making it too difficult, so I gave up.)
I think, someday, somehow, I’m going to print a few more bigger prints to hang on the other side of the armoire. For now, though, this travel photos wall is pretty damned sweet.
Wall of Travel Photos in my Apartment
Bonus points if you can name the locations of all these travel photos… GO!
I also printed out some more personal travel photos — photos of me and friends I made on the road — using Shutterfly, and hung those from some magnetic photo strings. It was a really easy, affordable, way to utilize some narrow wall space and get a lot up. Of course, I still have another fifty or so that I wish I could hang somewhere…
I guess I need a few more rooms?
Ali
January 15, 2016at9:20 amI love it! Andy and I printed 4 travel photos on canvas a few months ago to hang in our living room, and I love looking up at those memories. Eventually we’ll print more, smaller, non-canvas ones to decorate the rest of the apartment, but I agree, it’s really hard to choose which ones.
Val Bromann
January 15, 2016at12:06 pmIt is REALLY hard! I still have so many I want to get up. Just need to wait until I have more money and I need to figure out where to hang them 🙂 Canvases sound like a great idea!