Now that The family is complete, and I’ve added Dana to my walls, many of these framed photos are photos I hope to never take down. The pictures are perfect. Now I want the frames to be perfect to match. My chief complaint? Reflections in the glass. Curse you California sun.

Glaze is the industry term for the clear substance (glass or acrylic) that sits between the artwork and the outside world.

The first thing I looked into was museum glass. I had done some customs framing at Michael’s and the Museam Glass did a good job at cutting down the reflections. Chief issues was that it’s heavy (not great in Earthquake country), an super expensive. The bulk + weight makes shipping impractical. I had a hard time finding places that would sell it to non custom framers or in small quantities. The places that would ship to me charged about $50 for a single 8×10.

I next came across water white anti reflective glass. Water white refers to the fact that it shouldn’t add any tint to the photos. Since I was framing artwork (the butter footprints) on white paper, that was very important to me. I found it did an excellent job of cutting down ambient light to the point were I could easily see the texture of the photos from a few feet away. Direct sunlight was a different story. It wasn’t as good with direct light as the Museum glass, and not as good as I would have liked, but better than the cheap glass that comes in the cheap frames. I went from not being able to see any of the photograph, to not seeing most of the photograph. An 8×10 ran about $20.

The third option was to skip glazing all together. It’s not a perfect solution as the photo paper itself is slightly reflective, but if you’re wall is going to be bathed in sunlight half the day, it may be the only thing that works. One drawback is your artwork isn’t protected from the elements. That’s less of an issue when your artwork can be replaced by your home printer, but something to keep in mind if it can’t. To go this third route you need to potentially consider how hard it is to replace a cheap picture frame.

I should detour and mention that most of my frames are cheap, costing anywhere from a couple bucks for the small sizes to $20 to the matted large frames. I do have a couple expensive frames (mostly gifts). The expensive frames have sawtooth hangers (a long piece of metal with serrated edge) for hanging on the wall and point tabs for keeping the frame and backing together. I worry those point tabs will eventually snap off with repeated picture changes, so I’d rather not change out those prints any more than I have to.

I went the no glazing route for my 3 favorite photos. They’re hung low, easy to reach, and the sawtooth hooks make them easy to take down and put back up. Should the originals fade over time without protection they will be easy enough to replace. For the kids footprints I opted for protective glazing. Anything that was too large to be printed at home, or the metal tab points made it difficult to replace also got glazing.

The final consideration was sizing. Most frames the glazing matches the advertised picture size. For frames that come with mats the mats typically corresponded with a common photo size. For example The matted 5×7 picture frame had a mat that was 11×14, and the glazing matched that size. I did have two frames (4×6 and 5×7) where that was not the case. The first was a quarter inch smaller in each direction, the second was a hair thinner but I managed to get the glass in with a bit of force. I only needed one custom frame size for that 4×6.

Now I just need to figure out what to do with the old glass.

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