People buy frames the way they buy shoes: they measure the thing going inside and then look for something the same size. With a photograph that instinct is wrong, and it is the single reason a framed picture can look cheap on a wall it should have owned.
The mat is doing the work
A museum hangs a small photograph in a large field of board. Not to be grand — because empty space is what tells your eye the thing in the middle is worth looking at. Crowd a print to its edges and the eye reads it as a document. Give it room and the same print reads as an object.
Every Acrehand frame ships with a warm white mat, 2 mm acid-free board, cut so it overlaps each edge of the print. That overlap is structural as well as visual: it holds the photograph flat without tape ever touching the face of it.
A rule you can use
Pick the frame one size up from your print. A 4 × 6 photograph wants the 5 × 7 frame. A 5 × 7 wants the 8 × 10. You will think it looks too big written down and then find it looks right on the wall.
If you want the picture to carry a whole wall on its own rather than sit in a group, go two sizes up and let the mat be dramatic.
And if you are hanging several
A group reads as one object when the frames share a wood and the spacing between them is tighter than the width of the smallest frame — roughly 5 to 8 cm. Vary the sizes, keep the gaps constant, and line up either the top edges or the horizontal centres, never both.
You do not have to guess
Printing is included with every frame, so there is no separate print to order and no pair of measurements to reconcile. Send the photograph with your order and we crop it for the size and orientation you chose. If the file is too small to print well at that size, we come back to you before printing rather than after.