“…The goal of the present paper is to investigate the existence and uniqueness of symmetric approximations of frames (respectively, symmetric orthogonalizations of bases of Hilbert spaces) {f i } i∈N of Hilbert subspaces K ⊆ H. That means, we look for the existence and uniqueness of normalized tight frames (resp., orthonormal bases) {ν i } i∈N of Hilbert subspaces L ⊆ H such that the sum j∈N ν j − f j 2 is finite and admits the minimum of all finite sums j∈N µ j − f j 2 that might appear for any other normalized tight frame (resp., orthonormal basis) {µ i } i∈N of any other Hilbert subspace of H. We apply the approach of the third author to symmetric approximations of frames in Hilbert spaces by normalized tight frames. We can rely on fundamental work done by David R. Larson and his collaborators Xingde Dai, Deguang Han, E. J. Ionascu and C. M. Pearcy ( [10,13,16]), by A. Aldroubi [3], P. G. Casazza [4], O. Christensen [7,8,9] and J. R. Holub [14,15]. As a result we obtain that a symmetric approximation exists and is always unique if and only if the operator (P − |F |) is Hilbert-Schmidt, where (I − P ) denotes the projection to the kernel of |F |.…”