Family picture ideas

The best family picture ideas are not all photoshoots. Some of the pictures families value most are made from photographs that already exist — a holiday snapshot, an old print from a drawer, the one decent photo from a wedding. Below are twenty ideas in three groups: ones that start from photos you already have, ones you can set up at home with a phone, and ones built around an occasion.

Most lists of family picture ideas assume you are about to book a photographer, buy matching outfits and drive to a field at golden hour. That is one way to get a good family picture. It is not the only way, and for a lot of families — the ones spread across three cities, the ones with a toddler who will not stand still, the ones who simply have not got round to it — it is not the realistic one.

These need no photoshoot. They start from what is already on your phone, in a cloud backup or in a box.

The photo from a beach, a garden or a birthday where everyone happens to be together and smiling usually has everything a portrait needs except the setting: the light is wrong, the background is busy and the arrangement is accidental. All three can be rebuilt. The people cannot, which is why the snapshot is the valuable part. A black and white family portrait from a photo shows how.

Find an old photograph — the children small, or the parents young — and recreate it with the same people, in the same positions, years later. Hang or post the two side by side. It costs nothing but a willingness to sit on a grown adult's lap, and the comparison does all the work.

Pick a spot — the front step, a particular tree, the same end of the same beach — and take the same picture there every year. If you already have two or three years of accidental ones, you have already started.

Instead of a wall of twelve small frames, choose the single photograph everybody likes and print it large. One big picture of the people in a room reads as a portrait; twelve small ones read as a noticeboard. This is the idea that most improves a hallway for the least effort.

Photographs taken over twenty years on six different phones do not hang well together, because their colors disagree. Converting them all to black and white makes a mismatched set look like a series. How to make a picture black and white covers how to do it well on any phone, and the free black and white photo converter does it in your browser.

Find a photograph of a grandparent at the age a grandchild is now, and pair the two. The resemblance — or the complete lack of it — is the whole point.

Choose nine unposed photographs from the past year, print them the same size, and frame them as a grid. Unposed is the rule: the point is the year as it was, not as it was arranged.

No photographer, no location. A phone, a window and ten minutes. Family photos on a phone covers the three settings that make the difference.

Turn off every light in the room, put everyone facing the largest window, and take the picture from the window side. Side light from a window at face height is what portrait photographers spend money recreating, and it is free in every house between mid-morning and mid-afternoon.

Everyone in a single vertical file, tallest at the back, youngest at the front, against the darkest wall you have, lit from a window. It is the hardest pose in this list to get right with a camera — Family portrait poses explains exactly why — but even a near miss looks deliberate.

Every generation's hands stacked on top of each other, oldest at the bottom. It needs no faces, which makes it the one family picture you can take when nobody wants to be photographed.

The kitchen, mid-meal, nobody posing. Take a dozen frames from the end of the table at seated eye level. One of them will be the picture of what your family actually looks like.

A parent and children on a bed or a sofa with a book. Everyone looks at the page, not the camera, so nobody has to perform an expression.

Everyone lying on the floor or the grass, heads together in the middle, photographed from directly overhead. Small children treat it as a game.

Everyone against a bright window at sunset, exposed for the sky so the people go dark. Be honest with yourself about what this is: a mood picture, not a portrait. Nobody's face will be in it.

The baby at the front, held upright facing the camera, with everyone else behind. Older siblings holding the baby is the picture grandparents ask for first. Keep it short — a newborn gives you a few minutes.

The graduate at the front in cap and gown, the people who got them there behind. The diploma in hand is not a cliché so much as the reason for the picture.

A couple who have been photographed together at their wedding and rarely since. Recreate the wedding pose, or simply take the portrait that should have been taken every year.

The rarest family picture, because it requires everyone to be in the same place at once. When they are, take this one before anything else. When they are not, it can be assembled from photographs of each family taken separately — though each person needs to be clearly visible in the photo they come from.

The idea that fixes most Christmas photos is to remove all the color except one: a monochrome frame with a single red hat or scarf has a subject, where a frame with nine competing colors has none. Christmas family photo ideas covers light and arrangement in detail, and the Christmas portrait is that idea made from a photo you already have.

A portrait of a parent with their children, given to the other parent or to a grandparent. Children who have grown up and left home are the strongest version of this: the same faces, decades on, in the same arrangement as a photograph from when they were small.

Three questions settle it quickly.

What do you already have? If there is one good photograph of everyone together, start from it — ideas 1 to 7. If there is not, ideas 8 to 14 can be done this weekend.

When do you need it? A booked photoshoot needs weeks of lead time, especially in the autumn. Anything made from an existing photograph can be done in an evening.

Where will it go? A picture for a wall wants to be large and simple, so one strong portrait beats a collage. A picture for a phone screen wants to be vertical.

Whichever idea you choose, the same things decide whether the result is kept or forgotten:

• —Every face visible, turned roughly toward the camera, nobody behind anyone else.
• —People close together, touching rather than standing apart.
• —Good light on the faces — daylight from a window or outside, not a ceiling light at night.
• —Nothing competing with the people — a plain or distant background, few colors.