Planning where each piece hangs before anyone picks up a drill saves a long afternoon. The Gallery Layout card on an exhibition's Works tab is where you arrange the show against your real walls, try more than one arrangement, and hand the install crew a schematic they can work from.
Controlled rollout: multi-room layouts. Planning a show across several rooms at once is being enabled selectively, and access varies by organization. Single-room wall placement, described here, is available to every organization.
Set up your walls first
Layout is only as good as the room you describe to it. Define your spaces once under Admin → Gallery Spaces, then reuse them for every show.
Use Create space for each room, then open it and use Add a Wall for each display surface in it. Measure the actual walls before you start, because every position you plan is scaled against those numbers.
Open the exhibition, go to Works, and find Gallery Layout. Three views run across the top:
Room Overview is the working view: the walls with the placed pieces on them, which you drag into position.
Resolve collects anything that needs a decision, and shows a count when there is something waiting, for example a piece with no wall yet or one that no longer fits where it was put.
Installation Schematic is the output for the crew, and can be exported as a PDF.
When work is still unplaced and you have edit rights, Auto-Layout proposes an arrangement for you to adjust rather than starting from an empty wall. Hide Auto-Layout puts it away again.
Each placement carries its own position, and can carry notes. Keep curatorial reasoning and install instructions in separate notes, because you can share one without the other.
Trying more than one arrangement
Layouts are kept as named proposals in the sidebar, so a plan you are unsure about does not have to overwrite the one you have.
New Layout Proposal starts a fresh arrangement with its own name and description.
Clone Proposal copies an existing one so you can vary it. The dialog says it plainly: changes to the clone do not affect the original.
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Compare Proposals, also reachable from the Layout Compare card on the Tools tab, puts two side by side and lists what differs between them.
If a juror built a spatial suggestion for the show, you can clone it into a proposal of your own to work from. Cloning never activates the juror's version, and their original stays exactly as they left it.
Sharing a layout outside your team
Installers, lenders and board members usually need to see the plan without being given the planning tool. Share Layout creates a link with its own rules, so you can share the same plan two different ways.
Under What recipients can see, each of these is a switch:
Artist names
Measurements, meaning artwork sizes and positions
Curatorial notes
Installation notes, meaning the install crew's notes
Allow download / export, which is off unless you turn it on
Under Access controls you can Require sign-in, set an optional Access code, and choose when the link expires. You can also attach an email and a note so you remember who a link went to and why.
A shared link never exposes your original floor-plan file or any private source image. Recipients see the finished plan, scoped by the settings on that link. You can revoke any link at any time, and it stops working immediately.
Planning well
The tool records decisions. These are the decisions worth making:
Plan the visitor's route. Positions guide how people move and what they see first.
Spread the visual weight. Keep the largest or loudest pieces off one wall.
Choose your focal points deliberately, rather than letting them fall where the hanging order put them.
Leave the practical constraints in. Doors, direct light and high-traffic corners are all reasons to move a piece.
Finish two weeks out. That leaves time for the crew to prepare and for one honest look at the plan before it is real.
Troubleshooting
Pieces overlap in the plan. The overlap is real: the wall is not wide enough for the spacing you set. Increase the gaps or move a piece to another wall.
A piece is not where I put it. Check Resolve. A placement that no longer fits its wall, or whose artwork changed size, is queued there rather than silently moved.
A work is scaled wrong against the wall. The layout uses the dimensions recorded on the artwork. Correct the dimensions on the work, and the placement follows.
Nothing to arrange. The layout draws on the artworks in the exhibition. Add work to the show first, on the same Works tab.
