FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
You have two choices for displaying digital movie posters: you can either buy (or repurpose) any kind of TV you want, or you can buy a prebuilt system comprised of a TV and coupled with either preconfigured software or a hardware device used to display the poster art—often with extra bells and whistles. It's way less expensive (and way more fun) to put together your own system.
There are a number of retailers online who sell digital displays for movie posters. That’s where I started looking—but I wasn't happy with anything I found. Most of the offerings seemed overly expensive (in my opinion), many require subscriptions, the poster artwork had more of a “quantity over quality” vibe, and most just felt overkill with extra bells and whistles many people don’t really need. I’m sure owners of these systems are very happy customers, but I don’t have any personal experience with any of them, so I can’t vouch for or recommend any of them to you.
At a basic level, all a digital display needs to do is play back a slideshow of images. That’s it. So rather than buying an overpriced premade system with complicated software and extraneous features, I decided to assemble my own simple system.
All you really need is:
• A TV (repurpose an old one or buy a new one)
• An Android or Apple streaming device
• A vertical TV mount
• A slideshow app
• And an (optional) LED lightstrip to add some cinematic flair to your display
Check out our comprehensive guide for assembling your own digital poster display.
We’ve spent hundreds of hours retouching (and in some cases, restoring) this library of movie posters. However, depending on the original condition of the poster, we’ve made some judgment calls about what could be cleaned up, what should be cleaned up, and which imperfections (if any) should intentionally be left in the poster as an indicator of its provenance or as an historic artifact. Some posters also contain artifacts so significant that they will require more thorough retouching at a later date, or finding an alternate source for a poster that’s in better condition.
Many posters in the library come from the “modern” era of moviemaking (and movie marketing) and were created in the digital domain to begin with, and usually require no retouching. However, even these modern posters were not necessarily intended to be showcased on OLED displays with perfect black levels, so black levels have been recalibrated when needed to appear as perfect black on OLED displays. This makes a huge difference in the visual quality of even pristine, natively-digital posters. For movie posters from the pre-digital era, there is often extensive retouching required to help perfect the image.
To make digital versions of movie posters from the classic era, they must either be photographed or scanned (usually by collectors, resellers, or auction houses) and thus contain sometimes hundreds of natural imperfections like dust particles and dirt, scratches, inconsistent or faded color, uneven lighting, paper yellowing, visible corner weights, folds, tears, and creases. Our main effort is to clean up these artifacts, restoring the poster as closely as possible to a perfected, pristine state. Many of the posters in this collection have never looked better in any other library—but the collection is a work in progress, and some posters may be further refined over time.
That said, we’ve elected for now to retain certain imperfections in some posters. For example, the best-available sources for some posters may have visible creases from years of being stored or folded.
While we have eliminated creases from many posters, there are several posters in the collection where creases and folds remain visible. Over time we will revisit these posters to remove folds and creases, but these artifacts require the most time-intensive retouching (which in some cases means recreating elements of the poster’s artwork by hand), so we’ve left some of these artifacts intact for now as a hallmark from their era.
You may notice some classic posters also have a large white border ↗. This was not only a common layout design from that era, but will also frequently include visible crop marks and other print indicia intended for the poster printers to trim, or used by movie studios to identify the poster by its marketing department. These borders, crop, and print marks are kept in the digital versions for posterity.
Some modern movie poster designs also intentionally include layers of digital grunge ↗, dirt, scratches, and tears as a graphic effect to reflect the film’s marketing aesthetic. If the dirt and grunge is actually part of the poster’s art direction, we of course leave all of those details intact. It’s fairly easy to tell which effects are an intentional part of a poster’s art direction, and which are real artifacts resulting from age and handling.
And like film itself, you will frequently see evidence of grain or noise in printed posters. Modern movie posters typically do not have any noise or grain since they were created in the digital domain, but older posters (which could only be photographed or scanned to create a digital file) typically will have some amount of grain or noise, especially because all printed posters contain halftone or stochastic printing dots, which create a natural pattern that can be exacerbated through the process of photography, scanning, or digital manipulation.
Movie Posters Perfected is a one-person project. With such a large library of images, it’s very likely that I have missed some imperfections. But if you spot any egregious examples that should be resolved, I want to fix them. Just send me a note and I’ll attempt to address the issue as soon as possible.
Print movie posters have a different aspect ratio than high-definition televisions. Digital televisions have an aspect ratio of 16:9 (or 9:16 when vertically oriented). The size for a one-sheet movie poster is 27" x 40" for films after 1985 and 27" x 41" for films before 1985. Newer posters from the “Mondo” era of illustrated posters are usually 24" x 36", a more traditional size popularized by non-movie posters. These differing aspect ratios result in black bars above and below the poster art when viewed on a 9:16 vertical TV frame. However, one of the benefits of using an OLED for your digital display is that the black bars essentially “disappear” in a dark room, which is one of the reasons why we recommend them for digital poster displays over LED-based screens.
I have some favorite movie posters I’d like to add to the Movie Posters Perfected library. Can you add them?
Yes! You’re more than welcome to contribute to the Movie Posters Perfected library. If there are posters you’d like to share, just email them to me and I’ll add them to the library if they meet our basic criteria for quality, content, and resolution. I can’t guarantee that all posters will be added to the library.
I have some posters in my own collection that I would like to have retouched or restored. Do you offer that service?
Absolutely! I’m a professional image retoucher with over 30 years of experience. I can only accept digital files for movie poster retouching, and they must be of a sufficient resolution to make retouching worthwhile.
If you have a physical poster you would like to have retouched, you must have it professionally scanned or photographed beforehand to create a digital file for retouching. Turnaround time and fees vary by the degree of retouching or restoration required. Contact me for a quote.
Can I share my access to the Movie Posters Perfected
library with friends or online forums?
I would appreciate it if you didn’t. When I decided to create Movie Posters Perfected, I wanted access to be as simple as possible—and for one unreasonably-low fee. I didn’t want to convolute the experience with user accounts and passwords, access codes, membership or recurring subscriptions, download credits, or other methods intended to obfuscate sharing. If someone really wants to share their access with others, they’re going to do it no matter what barriers are in place.
We operate on the honor system. If you see the value and hard work that went into creating and maintaining this collection, I truly appreciate your support. The intentionally-low one-time access fee goes directly toward the cost of hosting the site, maintaining the library, and supporting the time I have spent (and will continue to invest) in retouching poster art.
The beauty of a project like this is that it can be tailored to whatever budget you have.
You can absolutely put together a basic, near zero-cost system if you have most of the components already. Or you could shoot for a midrange system, using a mix of existing equipment and some new gear for a few hundred dollars. Or true film fanatics can assemble a high-end system and buy everything new, resulting in a dedicated digital poster display with every recommended feature for a bit north of $1,000. It’s completely up to you. Here’s an idea of how you can assemble a system a few different ways working with a low, medium, or high budget.
note: These are not systems that I sell as products. These are just rough estimates of how much it would cost you to build them. All systems assume the availability of a Wi-Fi network and the ability to mount a TV to the wall. These estimates don’t include tax, possible lower sale pricing, or buying secondhand equipment, which is a great option to lower costs.
Basic System
cost: $85
equipment
Existing TV: $0
Rotating wall mount: $65
No LED lightstrip: $0
Existing USB thumbdrive: $0
Existing power strip: $0
TV’s built-in slideshow: $0
MPP library (offline): $20
Midrange System
cost: $490
equipment
43" LG LED TV: $340
Rotating wall mount: $65
No LED lightstrip: $0
Amazon Fire TV 4k Max: $45
Existing power strip: $0
gFolio app (Lifetime): $20
MPP live poster library: $20
Premier System
cost: $1,250
equipment
42" LG C3 OLED TV: $900
Rotating wall mount: $65
Govee LED lightstrip: $180
Amazon Fire TV 4k Max: $45
Power strip: $10
gFolio app (Business): $30
MPP live poster library: $20
No. Users are not permitted to create prints of movie posters. Movie Posters Perfected does not claim ownership over any of the artwork in the library, which remains property of their respective movie studios. The library is provided as an archive for personal use only.
Further, the posters in the library are sized for digital display only, and lack sufficient resolution for creating high-quality prints. Printed posters require a resolution of approximately 27" x 40" at 300 dpi—the posters in our library are in 4K resolution—which is nowhere near the size required for high-quality prints at poster size.
There are over 3,600 posters in the Movie Posters Perfected library representing over 2,500 different films. Unfortunately that means there’s not a practical way to provide a complete preview catalog of the whole library, especially since it’s always growing.
The library consists of films from virtually every genre and time period, so there’s a good chance the titles you’re interested in are part of the collection. And if you have any requests for films you were hoping would be in the library but aren’t, just send me a note and I should be able to add the title in a short timeframe if a good source is available.
Yes and no.
The beauty of the Movie Posters Perfected library is in its simplicity. My library is literally your library. So the moment I add a new poster to my collection, it immediately begins appearing on your display, too. That means you’ll get a constant stream of ever-growing movie poster art to appreciate with no effort on your part.
But I totally understand there may be occasions where you don’t want certain posters displayed in your home. For instance, you may have young children in the house and don’t want the overtly violent or risqué images sometimes used in poster designs to appear on your display. Or maybe you just dislike a particular film and don’t want to see it appear. There are four different posters for the 2019 film Cats in the library after all, and I’m not deleting them!
Unfortunately, there’s no way for each user to create their own bespoke collection while connected to the same live library as everyone else. We all share the same “playlist.”
However, if you are in a situation where you really do not want certain posters to appear on your display, you can run the Movie Posters Perfected library in “0ffline” mode, essentially making a copy of it on your own computer that you can modify however you want.
You’ll miss out on the benefit of new posters being automatically added to your display, but you may not want some of the new posters, either. You’ll need to add new posters to the library manually on your own, which you can always occasionally download from the live library you still have access to, so you can take advantage of the beautiful, ultra-high definition posters that have been cleaned up and calibrated for OLED TVs.
You can’t just delete posters you don’t want from the live library. Users do not have that ability, since it would delete the poster for everyone else, too. You’ll need to make a copy of the library onto your own computer to modify.
Here’s how to run the Movie Posters Perfected library in “offline” mode:
1. Log in to the Google Drive website by visiting drive.google.com. Use the same Google account you used to purchase access to the Movie Posters Perfected library. Many people have more than one Google account, so make sure you’re logged in with the right one or you won’t see the folder.
2. In the lefthand sidebar, choose “Shared with me.”
3. In the main file list, find the “Movie Posters Perfected” folder. If a lot of other people have shared files and folders with you over time, you may need to scroll or sort items by date to find it.
4. You are going to download the entire library to your computer so you can customize your own copy of it. Hover over the far right set of icons (or right-click anywhere on the blue bar), and click the Download icon. This is going to take awhile, so now is a great time to go watch a movie. The current size of the library is in the neighborhood of 200GB, so make sure you have the bandwidth and enough free space on your computer to download it all. You may want to download it to an external storage device if your internal computer storage is running low.
5. Now that you have a local copy of the library, you can customize it to your heart’s content. Go through the library on your computer and delete any posters you don’t want to appear on your display. tip: It helps to use some kind of visual file viewer like Adobe Bridge or simply use the Icon view in Windows Explorer or Mac Finder (with the icons set as large as possible) so you can see what the posters looks like and not have to go by filename alone. If you delete a poster and later change your mind, you can always redownload any poster art again from the live library.
6. Once you’ve customized your library, you have to make a decision about how you want to reconnect your slideshow app to this customized library. Thankfully, Snapwood Apps (makers of gFolio and pixFolio), have several options for both Android- and Apple-based platforms. Their various slideshow apps can connect to virtually every popular photo service, including:
— iCloud Photos
— Google Photos
— Google Drive
— Microsoft OneDrive
— Dropbox
— Flickr
You almost certainly use one or more of these services already, so you can choose whichever platform works best for you, and download the corresponding app from Snapwood. However, depending on what tier of storage space you have on your preferred system, you may need to upgrade your storage capacity to provide enough space for the customized poster library you created. You’ll need to have about 200GB available if you keep most of the library, and want enough room for expanding your collection over time. Or just delete enough posters to fit within the storage tier that you’re currently paying for if don’t want to increase your monthly subscription rate.
7. Reconnecting to your customized poster library through every other possible photo service is beyond the scope of this answer, but it’s a simple process to upload your customized library folder to your preferred service. Then, reconnecting it to the Snapwood slideshow app will be almost identical to the steps you took when you first signed up and connected to the live library. You got this.
Alternatively, if you prefer not to pay a monthly fee to host a large file library in the cloud, you can of course look into traditional offline slideshow apps. I do not have any specific recommendations here, but your Smart TV almost certainly has a built-in slideshow mode that may meet your needs—you would just need to transfer your library to a USB thumbdrive and plug it into your TV if that’s the approach that makes sense for you.
Yes, you can absolutely do that! And it is free and easy and works just fine and may be the right choice for many people, especially if you already have your own poster collection or you’re on a tight budget in a tough economy.
But here’s what you’d be missing with that approach:
— You can definitely run a slideshow of images on your existing TV. But it won’t capture the “magic” of feeling like an artifact from a real movie theater that so many of us grew up seeing and loving as part of the moviegoing experience. Instead it’ll just feel like what it is: a slideshow of pictures on your TV. I love to see my vertical poster display throughout the day—I have mine mounted right near my desk. It reminds me of the magic of going to the movies, and I find the art beautiful and inspiring, often triggering memories and nostalgia or an unexpected desire to watch a particular film again.
— People have good intentions, but live busy lives. One of the stand-out features of Movie Posters Perfected library is that the collection is live (and always growing) and you don’t have to do any work at all to add new posters to your display—ever. If you use your own “offline” collection on a USB drive, there’s a good chance you’ll never get around to adding any new posters to your display, and eventually you’ll get bored of what you’re seeing... and begin to ignore the display over time. Life tends to get in the way of hobbies, especially as you get older.
— The other drawback to a library on a thumbdrive is that you have to do all the work to source the poster art you want, whether it’s dozens, hundreds, or thousands of posters. For Movie Posters Perfected’s unreasonably-low $20 access fee, I’ve already done all the arduous collecting and curating for you, and assembled an epic library of gorgeous posters for over 2,500 films across every genre and time period. And because collecting digital movie posters is my personal hobby, I add new posters to the collection all the time. And as soon as I add them to my personal collection, they become part of your collection—instantly—thanks to the cloud.
— Another advantage to using the Movie Posters Perfected library is that several hundred of the images have been professionally retouched, eliminating imperfections like dust, dirt, scratches, tears, and visible folds. And even better, the black levels of every poster have been calibrated to offer perfect black levels on OLED displays. Chances are your own collection contains a lot of visible imperfections which can offer a certain charm, but pale in comparison to seeing vintage posters restored to their original quality as the movie studios intended.
If Movie Posters Perfected is cloud-based, what happens if I temporarily lose internet access?
Because the Movie Posters Perfected library lives in an active cloud-based folder, it does require a persistent internet connection so that it can stream posters to your display, and automatically display new posters when they are added to the collection.
While a persistent internet connection is usually not an issue for most poeple, everyone will experience interruptions in service from their ISP from time to time, which would also affect any other internet-based services in your home.
Movie Posters Perfected itself is hosted on Google Drive, which boasts a 99.9% uptime—so if you do temporarily lose access, it is likely an outage affecting all of your internet services.
If you find yourself disconnected from the live library, it’s always a good time to put on a movie and wait it out. Or go outside? Nah. Watch a movie.
How do I know when new posters have been added to collection, and what they are?
There’s an easy way to see when new posters have been added to the library, and you don’t have to wait for an email newsletter or follow a blog or social media account to find out. Because Movie Posters Perfected is hosted on Google Drive, you can simply go to the Google Drive website and check the Activity panel. It’s an automatically-generated, real-time activity log showing exactly when new posters were added to the library and what they are.
Here’s how to check the Activity panel on Google Drive:
1. Log in to the Google Drive website by visiting drive.google.com. Use the same Google account you used to purchase access to the Movie Posters Perfected library. Many people have more than one Google account, so make sure you’re logged in with the right one or you won’t see the folder.
2. On the right side of the screen, click the Activity tab. That’s it. Now you can see a real-time feed of which posters have been recently added to the collection. And if you want to preview what they look like, that’s easy too—just click the magnifying glass icon and Google Drive will show you the image. (If the right-hand sidebar isn’t visible, click the ⓘ details icon in the upper-right corner of the screen, which will reveal the sidebar.)
Assuming you’ve stayed connected to the live library when you signed up, these posters are already available and should appear on your display without any effort from you—remember: you don’t need to manually download or add them to your library. They’re already there!
There are tens of thousands of movie posters in the world. What’s your criteria for picking posters for Movie Posters Perfected?
Great question. There are a lot of movie poster sites on the internet, and most of them have much bigger collections than Movie Posters Perfected—some in the neighborhood of hundreds of thousands. Part of the reason why is that they’ve been around longer and have had more time build their libraries—and likely had more than one person sourcing them over the years. Movie Posters Perfected launched in January of 2024, and it’s run by one person.
But the other, more important reason is that the Movie Posters Perfected library is curated. That means I hand-pick only the posters I actually want, and I don’t simply hoard every single file I can get my hands on to inflate my numbers. We practice a “quality over quantity” policy, and I want you to feel delighted to see every single poster that appears on your display.
Here are the criteria we consider when adding new posters to the library:
Image quality & resolution
One important difference with our library is that every single poster is in ultra-high definition. In this case, that means 4K resolution or higher. We insist on this for the same reason you have a 4K TV, and why many of you also collect 4K UHD Blu-rays. The images just look dramatically better and more crisp—more like actual photos—with about 4x more image detail than standard HD resolution.
Every movie poster produced today is designed on a computer in very high resolution, and in many cases, those are the versions you’ll find in the library, representing the best-available poster image for that film.
Classic movie posters, however, are more of a mixed bag—especially because most were produced before the advent of computers. Those posters had to be either photographed or scanned by someone to make a digital file, and the quality will vary dramatically depending on how carefully the poster was photographed or scanned, and what the physical quality of the poster was like when it was digitized.
Some classic movie posters in the library may have had great design and been in good physical quality, but the resolution may not have been quite up to par. In those cases, we’ve upscaled the image using advanced AI algorithms to achieve our 4K criteria.
Our insistence on the best quality sometimes means that certain posters for even well-known movies may actually not be in the library—and may never be. In those cases, I was simply unable to source a satisfactory image for a certain title. There’s a chance that a great-quality image simply doesn’t exist, especially for earlier films. However, if I do run across a better-quality version of a movie poster that I already have in the collection, I’ll happily replace replace my copy with the better version.
Poster content
the key to key art: The other factor we consider for our collection is the content and information on the poster. An important distinction in our collection is that the vast majority of our posters are traditional “one-sheet” posters, which feature some combination of the movie’s key art, logo, tagline, starring cast names, production credits, premier date, and studio logos. Posters in our library must have some or all of these features to meet our criteria.
We do have hundreds of “teaser” posters in the library that feature different, usually more simplistic key art than the main poster, often with minimal use of logos and taglines, and typically lacking production credits in lieu of creating a design with more mystique before the full key art is released.
Bigger blockbuster films with ensemble casts and enormous marketing budgets also frequently produce tertiary supporting posters featuring individual characters from the film. We don’t include character posters in the library, as they are never as visually interesting or compelling as the film’s main key art, and often feel a little too much like an extension of a bloated marketing campaign.
That said, many films—especially today—produce multiple versions of primary key art designed to appeal to different audiences or simply for marketing variety, and we do include those variants in the library. In fact, there are over 2,500 films represented in the library, but over 3,600 posters—so you can see that many films in the library have multiple posters.
Finally, the vast majority of posters in the collection use key art released officially by movie studios. With very few exceptions, we don’t include fan-made movie posters, though there are a couple of posters with art created for film festivals, typically when a movie has been remastered and rereleased for a limited theatrical run.
posters vs. covers: We don’t include DVD and Blu-ray covers in the library, which typically only feature the film’s key art and logo. These simplified images are perfect to use for thumbnail covers in your digital movie library, but don’t serve the same purpose as full-fledged movie posters you would see in a theater lobby.
movie posters
video covers
Cover art images are also easier to come by, and are automatically downloaded by your digital media manager if you use a system like Plex, Kodi, Jellyfish, or Kalaidescape in your home theater, or if you use a streaming service for your home movie library like Vudu or MoviesAnywhere.
That being said, the Movie Posters Perfected library originally started because I wanted to collect digital posters for every single movie I owned, and I have a personal library of over 2,500 films ↗ on Blu-ray and 4K UHD discs—all of which have pristine, simple key art covers in my digital library. If there is interest in a high-quality collection of curated movie Cover art in a library similar to Movie Posters Perfected, I may consider making that library available, too. If you’d like to see something like that, please let me know!
language: Movie Posters Perfected features mostly English-language posters. There are some exceptions where a U.K. version of a poster is used instead (which almost always feature the same key art as the U.S. version), in rare situations where the U.K. version of the poster was available in higher resolution. Usually the only real difference is U.K. posters will refer to a film coming to “cinemas” rather than “theaters.”
There are also a handful of foreign-language posters, which includes a small collection of Asian films, such as select anime films (mostly from Studio Ghibli) and a smattering of classic Hong Kong Cinema films like John Woo’s seminal The Killer and Hard Boiled or Korean creature features like The Host.
one more note: We want to include as many good movie posters as possible, but in very rare circumstances a movie’s key art may be a little too tasteless or risqué for casually displaying on a home digital poster frame.
While the Movie Posters Perfected library has plenty of terrifying posters from my favorite genre—horror—with pseudo-violent or disturbing imagery that is not exactly kid-appropriate (lookin’ at you, Hostel II meat poster) there are maybe 2–3 posters that I decided not to include in the library, such as the poster for the original I Spit on Your Grave, which is both sexually explicit and violent, given the mature storyline of the movie.
My rule of thumb is: if I would panic if a poster appeared on my wall when my 8-year old daughter walked into the room, I don’t include it. And as I said, that’s maybe 2–3 posters out of over 3,600. Heck, I even found a tasteful poster for Cannibal Holocaust, so don’t worry too much about censorship.
If you would like to add posters that are more risqué to your own display while still accessing the full Movie Posters Perfected library, you can! Just make a second folder for your extra posters in your own Google Drive (“My Drive”) folder, and in the ⚙ Settings section of gFolio or pixFolio, choose “Randomize Multiple Folders” instead of “Randomize a Single Folder,” and you can easily add your own posters to your display. Since the new folder is in your own personal Google Drive, no one else using the Movie Posters Perfected library will see it, you sicko.
If I’m unsatisfied with the Movie Posters Perfected library or experience, can I get a refund?
Sure thing. I hope everyone enjoys the Movie Posters Perfected library and digital poster frame experience as much as I had building them, but if you decide you’re not going to keep using the library, just let me know within 30 days of signing up and I’ll issue a refund.
Hi, my name is Robert. I’m the film fan behind Movie Posters Perfected. I live in peaceful Marin County, CA, with my beautiful wife, daughter, and outrageously adorable toy poodle, Poppy. I work as a creative director and designer in the advertising industry—and spend a lot of my free time tending to my movie collection and endless pursuit of technology and consumer electronics.
I love movies. Love them. It sounds corny, but I think movies are our generation’s way of passing down stories the way history’s cultures did around campfires for centuries. We just have bigger screens and Dolby Atmos surround sound. The Hero’s Journey, retold countless ways through thrilling tales, terrifying beasts, epic sagas, dense dramas, charismatic characters, epic scores, amazing visuals, and unforgettable scenes that draw generation after generation to the magic of the movies.
There’s just something uniquely powerful about the shared, communal experience of watching movies together.
I spent a lot of time as a kid in the early 80s at the movies. What an incredible era for films. I must have talked my mom into taking me to watch all three original Star Wars movies twenty times each. For 1978’s original Star Wars, she dutifully whispered the opening title crawl to me each time since I wasn’t old enough to read. Star Wars was soon followed by other classics of the 80s. Raiders of the Lost Ark, Gremlins, Clash of the Titans, Dragonslayer, The Dark Crystal, Flash Gordon, Poltergeist, and E.T.
I have a very clear memory of watching The Karate Kid in a packed theater, and leaping to my feet, cheering with the entire theater when Daniel delivered the Crane Kick to Johnny’s smug face. (Fast-forward exactly 35 years later to another magical moment, where I sat in a packed auditorium again, and a theater full of grown-ass adults were moved to tears when a bunch of costumed Avengers stepped through some portals to reassemble.) The thrill is still there.
When home video came around in the 80s, I spent most Friday nights at my local video store, browsing movies on the shelf that were too scary for me to rent. I still remember the day my mom finally gave in and agreed to let me rent both Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things and Faces of Death. Big mistake (on both our parts).
As time passed, I started collecting laserdiscs; even then I appreciated the improved quality over VHS tapes. Laserdiscs gave way to the even-better quality (and more convenient form factor) of DVD, and eventually I upgraded every title again to Blu-ray. Technology marches on, and like others I now collect films on gorgeous 4K Ultra HD discs. How many times can one person buy Star Wars? A lot.
Currently I own over 2,500 films, with over 800 4K UHD titles—and growing every week. My personal collection is meticulously organized, alphabetized, and cataloged. My family and I enjoy an absurdly over-the-top Plex server, and look forward to our movie nights together. I think my daughter loves Mr. Miyagi as much as I did—and now we both cheer at that kick.
But like almost any other collecting hobby, a movie library can become a compulsion—I just happen think of it as a harmless vice that I truly enjoy. Managing my movie collection is relaxing and therapeutic, and feels somewhat like tending a garden and watching it grow.
To support my library of digital movies, I’ve collected high-quality cover art for my library over the years, spending hundreds of hours finding just the right covers, and perfecting their quality when needed.
And that led me to starting a collection of digital movie posters.
I’ve worked as an art director in the advertising industry for over 30 years, and have always felt that movie posters were essentially the perfect form of advertising. They’re a great crystallization of the medium: they have to grab your attention in a short timeframe, they promote a desirable product that is universally adored but challenging to market, and they are built using every fundamental element of graphic design, representing logo and branding design, layout and composition, excellence in typography and color theory, and powerful photography and illustration. Plus they have to work as a single, static image hanging on a wall. And as an advertisement, I would argue that some of the greatest brand taglines in history were written by a copywriter for a movie poster.
To me, the very best posters are conceptual in nature and are as well-designed as any work of art. But you can also tell when a design has been phoned in—which seems to be the case more and more often. Either way, every movie poster still has the exact same goal as they always have: to get you hyped for the movies.
I have nostalgic memories of seeing Tom Jung and Roger Kastel’s iconic posters for the original Star Wars trilogy in my local multiplex—Kastel’s Empire Strikes Back, my god—and of course Drew Struzan’s indellible illustrated posters that are inextricably bound to the visual language of cinema—and still mimicked to this day. Those images created a buzz in my mind sometimes more powerful than the films themselves, creating a sense of anticipation and excitement, knowing that more stories from my favorite universes were coming to a “galaxy near me” that summer.
During the pandemic, we all spent a lot more time at home, and many people took to nesting and looking for ways to make their homes more comfortable and convenient. I work from home sitting at a desk all day, and wanted to combine my love of movies, movie posters, and technology to create something that could bring a little bit of the magic of the movie theater home. While I’ll never be able to afford a dedicated home theater room, I figured the next best thing would be to have one of the best artifacts from a theater: my own, epic movie poster collection.
A lot of people collect and display traditional printed movie posters, but I just don’t have the wall space (or budget) for a physical poster collection. So I decided to look into a digital poster frame.
I had seen some ads for digital poster frames online, but they all seemed overpriced, used overly-complicated software, required (yet another) monthly subscription, had little-to-no quality control over the posters themselves, or had too many bells and whistles like badly-designed “Coming Soon” marquees digitally inserted over every poster, or the ability to play video games on the screen. I’m confident that there are lot of happy customers who use those premade systems, but they weren’t right for me. I just wanted a simple digital frame to do nothing but show high-quality poster art. That’s it. So I decided to assemble my own system—and it was less expensive and more fun than I thought it would be.
I learned a lot putting it together, and ran across a few unexpected challenges, so I thought I’d share what I learned in my comprehensive DIY Digital Display guide. Coupled with the Movie Posters Perfected live, curated poster library, I hope everyone can enjoy the same digital poster experience as I do every day.
That’s it.
The FAQ section is over.
