Tech Talker’s Guide to Wedding Planning
After walking down the aisle recently, Tech Talker reveals 4 awesome ways to incorporate technology into your wedding.
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Tech Talker’s Guide to Wedding Planning
As many of you know, there have been some big changes happening to Tech Talker lately. Aside from getting a house and a cat, I’ve also…drum roll please…tied the knot! That’s right – now there’s a Mrs. Tech Talker!
Getting married has opened my eyes to the world of wedding planning (not that I could have done any of it by myself). It also surprised me at how much tech is now involved in planning a wedding.
In this week’s episode I’ll be covering some fun and interesting wedding tech that might help you or someone you know plan their big day.
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Photo Booth
One really fun thing to have at a wedding is a photo booth. There are plenty of companies out there that you can hire to set up a photo booth at your wedding reception, but with a little DIY tech work you can make one for a fraction of the cost. Plus after you’ve made yours, you can use it for parties and other events in the future.
There are a few parts to this photo booth. The first and easiest is the backdrop, if you don’t have something in mind already you can head down to your local hardware store and build a pretty nice backdrop with the use of some PVC pipe. You’ll pretty much want to make something you can drape fabric over or anything else that will match your colors (I found out that color-matching at a wedding was pretty important).
The rest of the photo booth is all tech. You can do this in a number of ways. If you have a Mac computer you’re probably familiar with the built-in photo booth software that comes with most Apple computers.
This is by far the easiest way to go because you can set your laptop up on a podium or table and use it to take pictures for your guests.
However, if you want a professional quality photo booth, there is a great piece of software made by Breeze Systems that has a ton of awesome features. This software allows you to hook up a professional camera to your computer such as a Nikon or Canon DSLR (these are the big fancy cameras most photographers use).
The software allows you to set a custom time interval to take multiple pictures. It allows you to print the pictures right after they are taken (provided you have a printer attached), and it even saves these pictures to your computer so you can email them or post them after the wedding.
I could go into much more detail about the software and how to set it up, so if you’d like to know more, post a comment or question on the Tech Talker Facebook page. If there’s enough interest, I’ll do a YouTube video and a blog post to show you the set-up I created for my wedding! For now, here’s a pretty good YouTube video explaining one way of setting it up. This software works with both Windows and Macs.
Wedding Party
The next piece of wedding tech is an app that all guests can download. It’s called Wedding Party and it allows your guests to share videos and pictures with one another, and best of all, with the bride and groom. I found this app while trying to figure out a way to gather all of the pictures taken by my friends and family during the event. With this app, everyone at the wedding can take pictures using it, and after the wedding you can log into your event and download all of the pictures.
Obviously not everyone will want to install an app onto their device just for your wedding, but if a lot of your friends and family already use Instagram, this might be right up your alley!
Guestbook
Okay so this next idea was completely my wife’s (“my wife” – it still feels weird to say it!). Originally I just thought of a guestbook as a plain book with empty pages that everyone would sign as they walked in. Well, Mrs. Tech Talker came up with the awesome idea of making a photobook of our engagement pictures and using that as the guestbook.
We made ours at SnapFish.com and it was super simple. It took about an hour and looked pretty commonplace when it arrived a few days later.
This way our guests didn’t have to just look at intimidating empty pages and wrack their brains for something to write. They could flip through a custom photo album and be inspired to write comments and well-wishes. We just left a lot of white space around the images.
WeddingWire
Last but definitely not least was WeddingWire. This a website and app combination that takes a lot of the guesswork out of your planning. This website helps you build a budget, timeline, and event website.
After the initial set-up, you simply add your parameters such as the date of the wedding, how much you want to spend, and the number of guests. From there it will then build out a to-do list of things you should do and the timeline for when you have to do them. You can even set it up to send you reminders for when you should have certain things done like, booking the venue or picking the caterer.
It will even break out the average cost of items for your wedding based upon your budget.
By far my favorite feature of WeddingWire was that it would help build you a website for your wedding. No coding experience necessary, just choose your theme and drag and drop. You could even hook it up to your own domain if you had one. This site/app combo was awesome and free. I highly recommend checking it out!
Okay now I’m really curious if any of you have used tech at your wedding. If so I’d love to hear from you! Post all your experiences in the Comments section or on the Tech Talker Facebook wall.
Well that’s all for today! Have a question about anything in this episode? Or a suggestion for a future podcast? Send me an email at techtalker@quickanddirtytips.comcreate new email.
As always, go to quickanddirtytips tech-talker for a full archive of episodes.
Until next time, I’m the Tech Talker, keeping technology simple!
Wedding party, wedding checklist, and other images courtesy of Shutterstock.
