Hang-a-Pic: For designing a gallery wall on your phone

I sometimes get angry when I watch HGTV. If it’s not the over-the-top “House Hunters” lamenting that they can’t buy a million-dollar home because they don’t like the wall color (It’s called paint, people, paint!), it’s one of those DIY shows where furniture seems to magically put itself together.

Every home-improvement project on Pinterest and cutesy blogs should warn: This is not as easy as it looks.

So, when I learned about an app called Hang-a-Pic that claims to make one popular interior-design trend — the gallery wall — truly easy to do, I was eager to test it.

For those who don’t follow home-decor shows and sites: A gallery wall is a collection of frames hung together on a wall to become a focal point in a room. The frames can hold anything — expensive art or selfies, we won’t judge — but the idea is to arrange them in a way that looks crisp and organized.

To achieve that look, it’s crucial that the frames are evenly spaced and centered on the wall. When you have frames of varying sizes and a large wall space, that task can be daunting to even the most expert wielder of a tape measure.

Despite its ’90s-ish design, Hang-a-Pic deftly does the math for you. You tell the app how many frames you have, what size they are and the style of hook required.

Then, by entering the width of the wall and the distance you want between your frames, Hang-a-Pic tells you how to measure exactly from the end of your wall to where each nail should be placed.

The app isn’t doing anything you couldn’t do with a sketch and a calculator, but I’ve messed up measuring enough times to appreciate my phone doing it for me.

You don’t need to be creating an entire gallery to use the app, either. It accommodates arrangements from five frames across to just one. This is especially helpful if your one frame requires two nails to hang.

Now, it’s worth buying Hang-a-Pic only if the gallery wall you want to create is basic. The app is great for aligning frames horizontally, but if, for example, you want to align one large vertical frame with two stacked horizontal frames, that gets a little more complicated than Hang-A-Pic can handle.

The app might still be useful, but it would probably require you to bring back out the sketchbook and calculator. As they should say on HGTV, it’s just never as easy as it looks.