Wall Art Size Guide Generator

Everything in the picture is a real measurement

A size guide is only worth adding to a listing if a buyer can trust it, so nothing in this scene is drawn "about right". Every object is stored in inches and converted with a single pixels-per-inch value calculated once per render. The frames and the furniture share that one number, which is what makes the comparison honest.

That last row is the awkward one, and it is worth knowing about because it changes your output. Gaps are specified in inches, but the size labels underneath each frame are text measured in pixels — and the inches-to-pixels scale depends on how wide the gaps end up being. The layout breaks that circle by iterating: guess a scale, push apart any pair of frames whose labels would touch, recompute the scale, repeat. It settles after about three passes. The practical effect is that ticking Also show centimetres adds a third line of text under every frame, which can force the gaps wider and shrink every frame a little to keep the row inside 2000 px.

Why the frames sit at that height

Each room scene has a target centre line and a floor the lowest frame edge is not allowed to drop below. Above a sofa centres art at 60 in with a 40 in minimum bottom edge; above a bed centres at 66 in with a 56 in minimum; bare wall + person centres at 57 in, the eye-level height normally used when a single work hangs on its own.

The two rules interact in a way that catches people out. The centre line is whichever is higher: the scene's default, or the minimum bottom edge plus half the height of your tallest selected print. Tick 24 × 36 in the bed scene and the required centre becomes 56 + 18 = 74 in rather than 66 in — so the entire row lifts, and the little 8 × 10 you also ticked now floats at 74 in too, its bottom edge 69 in off the floor. Nothing is broken; every frame shares one centre line by design, the same way a real gallery hang works. But if the arrangement looks oddly high, the largest size you ticked is the reason.

Above the sofa the same 24 × 36 keeps the default 60 in centre (40 + 18 = 58 is lower), so its bottom edge lands at 42 in — ten inches of clear wall above the 32 in sofa back. That gap is roughly what interior guides suggest, and it is the quickest sanity check that your selected size range makes sense for the furniture you are showing it against.

Which of these sizes can share one artwork file

Offering seven sizes does not mean exporting seven files — but it does not mean exporting one, either. What matters is the aspect ratio. Sizes with the same ratio are the same picture at different scales; sizes with different ratios need a different crop, and the preview here shows you exactly that, because your uploaded artwork is centre-cropped to fill each frame.

Read down the ratio column and the usual seller shortcut falls apart. The A-series is 1.414 and 5 × 7 is 1.400 — close enough that people assume one file covers both, and it nearly does, but 11 × 14 at 1.273 and 8 × 10 at 1.250 are genuinely different shapes. Print an 8 × 10-ratio design at A4 and something has to give: fill the 11.69 in height and the image wants to be 9.35 in wide against A4's 8.27 in, so 1.08 in — about 11% of the width — is cropped away. If your composition has a signature or a horizon near the edge, that is where it goes.

The safe approach is to design at the largest ratio you sell and export a deliberate crop per ratio group, rather than letting whoever prints it decide. Then check the resolution holds up at the top of your range — the pixel column above is the 300 DPI requirement, and DPI vs PPI explained covers the arithmetic and the reason a 300 DPI file is not automatically a 300 DPI print.

Choosing which sizes to put on the guide

There is a real cost to ticking everything. The canvas is a fixed 2000 px wide, so every size you add has to be paid for by shrinking all the others. The three defaults — 8 × 10, 11 × 14, 16 × 20 — settle at 12.83 px per inch against a wall the readout calls 156 in, about thirteen feet. Tick all ten presets and the row needs at least 199 in of wall, over sixteen feet, the scale falls to roughly 10 px per inch, and the 8 × 10 shrinks to around 80 px — four per cent of the image width.

Four per cent is nothing on a listing viewed full screen and invisible in a search result. The size labels are drawn at 26 px on that 2000 px canvas, so a buyer scrolling a results page at a few hundred pixels wide is looking at type five pixels tall. Which means the thumbnail has to work on silhouette alone — the labels only start earning their keep once someone taps through. Pick the smallest size you sell, the largest, and two in between, and the shape comparison survives being shrunk.

Label them anyway. A buyer who has zoomed in wants to know which rectangle is which, and if you sell outside the US, put at least one A-series size in the selection — an international buyer who has only ever bought A3 frames has no intuition for what 11 × 14 means, and seeing A3 drawn beside it does the conversion for them. The two ladders do not interleave neatly, and our tables of standard print and frame sizes list both in millimetres, inches and pixels if you want to see where they land relative to each other before picking.

What comes out is a 2000 × 1400 px PNG. That is a listing photo, not the hero shot: the first image should be the artwork itself, and the size guide belongs second or third, right where a buyer starts wondering which one to order. Our guide to Etsy image sizes covers how the platform crops and displays each slot.