The difference between a gallery wrap and a stretched canvas:

Many people get confused between a gallery wrap and a stretched canvas. Gallery-wrap is a modern style of displaying art over thick wooden bars. It is a stretched canvas that doesn't have any visible staples or nails holding the fabric to the wooden stretcher bars so the painting could be hung unframed.



Stretched canvas is something completely different. In order to have your painting framed it first has to be stretched across stretcher bars. A stretched canvas differs from a gallery wrap. First, the stretcher bars are thinner allowing the staples to show on the sides of the wood. Therefore, unlike the gallery wrap, a stretched canvas is not a finished look to hang an oil painting on the wall.
Gallery-wrap is a very popular way to display art, however, because the edges of the canvas are wrapped over the thick bars, about two inches of the painting from each side are lost in the wrap unless the canvas is prepared with enough extra canvas that will allow the wrap not to cause a loss in the visible painting. In order to minimize the effect of the area lost in the wrapping process, various photo editing techniques are often employed to fabricate additional image or material to be presented on the wrapped edges.