Album art is recognisable. When you see it, you instantly imagine a song associated with it. That makes it personal, and personal art is the most powerful type of picture to have as a hanging art installation.
It motivates, inspires, and it makes your home feel more like your space.
CDs and LPs are often put into storage. Rarely listened to because almost everything is now digital. With album art, you can still enjoy the good vibes that you associate with your favourite albums, and/or artists by framing the art they used.
Whether you have a CD or LP collection on shelves, or in storage (perhaps in the loft), all your favourites can be transformed into a memorable collection by scanning and combining each covers artwork into a collage print for display.
The best part is that it doesn’t need to use a tremendous amount of wall space. This is because the covers can be scanned and then shrunk in size to fit into compact spaces.
The process involved to get album art into a collage display
1. Scan the album art
If you don’t have an all-in-one printer with a scan function, there is a good chance that the camera app on your phone has a scan feature. It does the same job. It creates a digital scan of a tangible item.
2. Crop your scanned images
When you scan your image, whether with a phone or a flatbed scanner, there may be some white space around the edges that appears as a border. Pop into edit mode with whatever photo app that you use, either on your phone or computer, and then select crop. A grid overlay appears over the image. Move the grid until only your album cover is in the picture without any blank space surrounding it as a border.
With your album image ready, all that is left to do is to resize it. For the purposes of creating a collage print, the full-size scan will be too large.
3. Resize your photo
If you are using a Windows PC, the Photo app has a resize feature. Open your scanned photo in the Photo app, click the three vertical dots on the top right, and then from the drop-down menu, click on resize.
There are pre-set configurations, or you can use the custom size to insert your own width and height dimensions. The pre-set sizes are mainly for digital use as it reduces the file size. As an example, resizing to a thumbnail (the smallest size) reduces the file size to 0.25 megapixels. It will be tiny. Like a 16px x 16px profile picture.
When creating a collage of original scanned documents, the general consensus is to reduce the size to 25% of the original.
If you are using a photo editing app that has the option to change the sizes to 25% of the original, use that. Otherwise, divide the height and width of the image by 4, and insert those as “custom dimensions”.
4. Upload your edited images to an online collage maker
Different collage makers have different configurations. At The Picture Gallery, our multi-aperture frames are suitable for up to 25 photos. In this case, it would be 25 album covers, each sized at 4” x 4”. Different sizes of apertures can have different layouts selected.
Select the size of collage frame that you need, choose your layout, and then upload the edited scanned images of your album art.
Once done, you can customise things with a single or double mount and choose the photo frame.
Getting your album art into a creative collage display really is as simple as digitising the album cover, doing minimal photo editing, and then printing the art for framing. Once done, you will have a bespoke collage display personal to you.