Printing Wall and Artwork Labels | Exhibitions

Admin → Labels is where you print the cards that go on the wall beside a piece and the labels that go on the back of it. You pick an exhibition or a call, choose wall or back-of-artwork, choose a template, and download a print-ready PDF. Everything that used to sit behind a separate Labels Hub rollout is now part of this page, available to every organization on every plan.

The page has four tabs: Print, Label stock, Templates, and Settings. Any team member with programming access can use Print and Label stock. Templates and Settings are limited to owners and admins.

Printing a run

On the Print tab, work top to bottom.

Choose the exhibition or call whose pieces you are printing. Exhibition labels come from the artworks in the show. Call labels come from the call's accepted submissions.
Choose the Label type: Wall is the business-card-sized card mounted next to the artwork, Artwork is the back-of-artwork label with piece details.
Choose a template. Standard layout is the built-in one, and your saved templates appear alongside it, filtered to the label type you picked.
Choose the Order: Source order or Artist last name A-Z.
Click Generate labels.

Under the template picker, Data coverage tells you what will actually print before you spend the paper. Each field on the template is listed with how many pieces have content for it, for example that all 42 artworks have a title but only 9 have a statement, with a suggestion to hide a field that is empty everywhere. It also warns when two fields on the template would print the same text twice.

If you want a template to be used here automatically from now on, use Use automatically for this exhibition (or for this call). Standard layout cannot be saved as an automatic choice, and the page says so.

Printing from a call

The call's submissions page has three separate print entry points, and each one prints something different:

Print labels in the Call actions menu prints the whole call: every accepted submission.
Print labels in the selection bar, which appears once you tick pieces, prints only the ticked pieces.
Print list in the list toolbar prints the submission list itself, not labels.

All three open the same Print labels dialog, which names what it is about to do: All accepted submissions or 12 of 40 selected will print. It also tells you what it left out, for example withdrawn or unaccepted pieces, under Skipped. Choose your label type, template and order, then Generate PDF.

Printing from an exhibition

Open the exhibition and use the Labels card under Print & Layout on the Tools tab. The exhibition's own label controls also let you select pieces from the artwork list and use Print labels... for just those.

What goes on a label

The fields available to a template are the artwork's title, artist, medium, dimensions, year, price, image description, statement, description, category, inventory code and availability.

Artwork photo. A template can carry one artwork photo. On the standard path it is the Artwork photo on each label checkbox. In the template editor it is the Artwork photo you add from the field list. A template can hold one photo, not several.

QR code. Labels can carry a QR code that sends a visitor to the piece's public listing. The controls are QR Code, Logo in QR, which drops your logo into the middle of the code, and QR size (%). Where the code points comes from your Custom URL Pattern in Admin → Labels → Settings. If scans land on the wrong page, check that pattern first.

Price. Price display offers Show price, Hide price, or Show “Inquire”. A piece marked not for sale prints NFS regardless, and pay-what-you-wish pricing prints its own wording.

Rewriting the text on a wall label

Gallery staff often want the wall card to read differently from what the artist typed on the entry form. You can rewrite that text for the label alone, and the artist's submission, profile and portfolio stay exactly as they were.

Open the submission and find the wall-label text control. It offers three choices, with the artist's original text shown below them:

Use original text, which is how every piece starts. The label keeps following the artist's text if they change it later.
Custom wall-label text, up to 10,000 characters. The box starts with the artist's original text, so you edit it rather than retype it. Reset to Original puts the original back, and Show Original opens it for comparison while you work. Save stays off until your text differs from the original. To print the artist's words unchanged, choose Use original text.
No narrative, which prints the rest of the label with no paragraph at all.

Fix with Frida can do the first pass for you:

Tidy Up keeps the artist's own words and fixes spelling, punctuation, capitals and stray line breaks, trimming the text if it is too long for a label. It works on the text in the box, or on the original if the box is empty.
Rewrite in Third Person does the same tidy, and also turns "I paint…" into the gallery's voice, such as "Adams paints…". It only changes the voice when you choose it.
Write One drafts a label in the gallery's voice from what is recorded: the piece's title, medium, size, year, category, statement and description, and the artist's bio and statement on their profile. It never adds awards, education, exhibitions, influences, techniques or intent that are not on record. A detail from the artist's bio is used only as the bio says it. If the piece has no statement or description, Frida looks at the artwork image and describes only what she can see, and the editor notes Drafted from the image so you know to check it.

Either way the draft lands in the Custom wall-label text box for you to edit. Nothing is saved until you choose Save Wall-Label Text, and Reset to Original puts the artist's text back.

Save before you print, because the PDF uses the saved text. If a colleague saved different text while you had the page open, saving tells you so and shows their copy under Current saved text next to yours.

You can do the same without leaving the print: for wall labels, each piece in the Print labels dialog carries its current choice as Original, Custom, or No narrative, and you can edit and save it there. Generate PDF waits until every open edit is saved or discarded, and says Save or discard the wall-label text first.

To check every piece's label text at once, use Review Label Text beside the count of labels that will print. It opens the call's Labels & Export Review page, where each piece's title, artist, medium, dimensions, price and description sit side by side. The link waits, like Generate PDF, until open edits are saved or discarded. It appears when printing from a call, not from an exhibition.

One limit is worth knowing. Custom text feeds the artwork text and a piece-sourced paragraph field. A template built on the raw statement or description field, or on artist-profile text, keeps printing the artist's own words, and the editor tells you when that is the case.

Label stock and sheets

The Label stock tab holds a catalogue of Avery sheets, both US Letter and A4, plus three Crafted Call layouts for US Letter: quarter-sheet 4-up, third-sheet 3-up, and eighth-sheet 8-up. Search by SKU or description, for example Avery 5371, then use Create template on a result to build a template bound to that sheet's exact geometry.

Two things make a bound template print straight:

Calibration sheet prints a test page so you can measure how far your printer drifts and correct it.
Start at label # skips positions you have already used on a partly used sheet.

For a custom-background template, Tile 4 per Letter page (cut in quarters) puts four labels on one Letter page. It is unavailable for PDF backgrounds and for templates larger than a quarter page, and the page says which reason applies.

Paper size. The Crafted Call quarter, third and eighth-sheet layouts and the 4-up tiling option are US Letter only. Galleries in Australia and New Zealand should bind templates to the A4 Avery sheets in the catalogue, which print at true A4 geometry.

Templates

Saved templates belong to your organization, so one house style is available on every exhibition and call.

Standard layout needs no setup. Choose your fields, layout and size and print.
Every other template, whether you start from a layout, a label product, a blank label, a Word import or a background image, opens in the same template editor.

The template editor shows a picture of your label with sample artwork data. Drag a field to move it and drag its handles to resize it. The field list names every field, such as Title, Artist or Price, with an eye to show or hide it, and Add puts in fixed text, an artwork photo, a QR code or a border. Select a field to set its font, weight, size, colour, alignment and how long text fits, or to make it Sit below the line above so it moves down when the line above runs long. Exact positions are in inches from the top-left of the label. On the left you set the name, label type, label product, size, a starting layout, Price display and an optional background: a JPEG, PNG, WebP or PDF up to 10 MB, for pre-printed stock or letterhead.

Print Proof below the picture is a real PDF of your unsaved template, made by the same printer code as your labels and refreshed a moment after each change. Check it before you save. If you leave with unsaved changes, the editor asks first. Templates made with the earlier editor open converted and say so; check the proof, then save, and they print the same as before.

Fonts. The three standard PDF faces, Helvetica, Times and Courier, are always available, alongside a bundled catalogue of open-licence families you can filter by Sans, Serif, Condensed and Standard. Each field has its own font. You can also upload your own TTF or OTF font, which is embedded in the generated PDF and can be used on any template. Because embedding a font is a licensing matter, you have to confirm your organization holds the rights to use it.

Preview. The Preview pane on the Labels page shows the selected template rendered with Sample data, so you can check a design before any real work exists. From an empty exhibition or call you can also use Download sample labels to get a full PDF with placeholder artworks.

Bin tags for bin, card and print pieces

Wall labels cover the pieces your show hangs. Bin work, card packs, prints and anything else in a group your call keeps off the walls get bin tags instead: a small sticker with the title, artist, group and price, and a QR code that opens the piece's buy page on your gallery's own web address.

Open Admin → Labels, choose the Inventory source, and pick the call under Bin tags for a call. You can also click Print Bin Tags after checking a packet in at the Intake desk, or Print their bin tags when a call is selected on the Print tab. Every accepted piece that is checked in gets one tag per piece, so a pack of 12 cards gets 12 tags. Change the copies or leave a piece out before you print.

A tag shows the piece's sale price once it is listed for sale. Until then it shows the artist's price, and the page tells you which pieces are not on sale yet, so list them before the show opens. A piece with no price prints without one. If some pieces' pages are not published yet, Publish them from the same page so their QR codes lead somewhere.

Draft labels before decisions are final

When a call has no accepted pieces yet, the Print tab offers Generate draft labels (n), built from the submissions still awaiting jury review. Every page is stamped DRAFT and the filename is marked as a draft, so you can test a template against real submitted data without anyone mistaking the output for the finished set.

Award labels

If your exhibition is linked to a call with awards, Award Labels (PDF) produces one bordered card per confirmed winner, showing the exhibition, the award, the winning artist and piece, and the juror's citation. The exhibition has to be linked to a call with confirmed winners, or the button reports there is nothing to print. To set up the awards and citations that print here, see Awards & Prizes.

Troubleshooting

A piece is missing from the run. The dialog's Skipped line names why. Withdrawn, rejected, unaccepted and deleted pieces are left out on purpose.

The order is not what I expected. Back-of-artwork labels default to artist last name, wall labels default to source order. Change it with Order. A piece with no last name on file sorts by its full name, and the dialog says how many did.

A field prints blank on some labels. Check Data coverage before printing. It counts how many pieces have content for each field on the template.

Labels are still generating. Large runs build in the background. Wait a few seconds and try again.

The QR code links to the wrong place. The link comes from Custom URL Pattern in Admin → Labels → Settings. Update the pattern, then generate again.

Next steps

For more help, contact support@craftedcall.com.