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Turn your iPhone photos into wall art with Art.com's Photos To Art app

The fine folks at Art.com have been "helping people find the art they love, so they can love their space more" since 1998 -- that's almost a century in Internet time. The service has long offered quality art reproductions of classic and modern works, but it was only about 18 months ago that it began printing user-contributed images on demand via the Photos to Art service. Since some 30 percent of all home decoration is personal photography, it's caught on quickly.

The natural next step for Photos to Art is, no surprise, an iPhone app. Given the rapid advances in phone camera quality, it's now eminently practical to skip the whole download your photo/upload to website stage and simply use the app to spec and order your framed artwork.

The app is cleanly designed and has some nifty features to make the ordering process go smoothly. Once you pick your photo (from Instagram, your camera roll or live from the iPhone's camera) the app calculates how large a print you can safely get with the available image data. A canvas print is more forgiving of low-res images, while other substrates may need finer-grained files.

You can pick from several mounting and framing choices, then you get a "wall mount" view which shows your selected design in one of several typical room looks, with a scale view of a sample person holding the frame for size reference. You can even snap a picture of the real wall you're adorning, then see the product in position where it will actually end up. Check the price, and click through to have your new work of art shipped to you.

The Photos To Art app joins Art.com's two existing iOS apps, the artMatch iPhone catalog browser and the artCircles iPad discovery engine, on the App Store. All three are free.