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Wedding day timeline generator
Tell it when the ceremony starts and where it is. It returns a full run of show — getting ready, load-in windows for every trade, the ceremony, the reception, and the fifteen minutes at sunset that everybody forgets to put on the page.
Or start from one of these
Three real shapes of wedding day, filled in. Change anything on them and the rest moves.
- A four o'clock ceremony in Austin, May, with a first look
One venue, photographs finished before guests arrive, and sunset landing squarely in the reception.
- A three o'clock church ceremony in Charleston, October, no first look
Two locations, a drive in the middle, and every portrait squeezed between the recessional and the light going.
- A five-thirty ceremony in Nashville, December
The short-day problem, stated plainly: the sun is gone before the vows are.
Why the first look question
It is the only answer here that changes the structure of the day rather than sliding it. With a first look, every photograph except the sunset fifteen minutes happens before the ceremony, and the couple gets their own cocktail hour. Without one, eighty minutes of family, wedding party and couple portraits have to fit between the recessional and the moment the light goes — which on a December afternoon is a genuinely impossible arithmetic, and the generator will tell you so rather than quietly producing a page that cannot happen.
The long version, with both timelines side by side, is in what a first look actually does to the timeline.
What this assumes
- A wedding of ordinary size — roughly 80 to 150 guests, a party of four to six, one photographer with a second shooter. Everything scales up from there and very little scales down.
- A thirty-minute ceremony. A full mass, a multi-faith ceremony or a ketubah signing is longer; add the difference and let the rest move with it.
- Vendor load-in counted back from when the room has to be finished, because that is the number a venue enforces. Nothing here has been agreed with anybody — venue access is the first thing to confirm and the thing that moves every other line.
- Sunset and golden hour computed astronomically for the coordinates given, on the venue's own clock, with daylight saving handled. It is the same calculation the Runsheet app runs, so the two agree.
Next
- Golden hour calculator — the light, for any date, in more detail
- Vendor coordination checklist — who has to agree with whom, and by when
- All guides — timelines, benchmarks and load-in patterns