The wedding family photo list, and how to keep it short

Your photographer will ask for a family photo list about a month before the wedding, and most couples write it in ten minutes on a Tuesday night. That ten minutes decides whether the group photographs take eighteen minutes or fifty.

It is worth more attention than it gets, because it is the only part of the day where a piece of paper directly buys back time. Here is a list that works, the rules that make it run, and the failure modes that turn it into the longest part of the afternoon.

What a wedding family photo list is actually for

It is a list of groupings, written in the order they will be shot, with real names against every role. Not "bride's family" but the four people that means, by first name.

The reason for the names is that your photographer has never met any of these people. Without a name they have to call out a relationship into a crowd of eighty and wait to see who moves, and the difference between calling "Ana and Tomislav" and calling "the bride's parents" is about ninety seconds every single time. Over fifteen groupings that is the whole overrun.

The order matters for the same reason. A list that starts with the biggest group and shrinks lets people leave as they are finished, so the crowd standing around drains steadily instead of everybody waiting for everybody.

A list that works

Fifteen or so groupings is a comfortable number and twenty five is where the afternoon starts to hurt. This order works for most weddings and adapts easily.

• Everyone. The whole wedding, once, immediately after the ceremony while nobody has wandered off yet. This is the hardest one to reassemble later and the one most couples forget to ask for.
• Both families together with the couple.
• Couple with the partner one's parents, then with their whole immediate family, then with grandparents.
• Couple with the partner two's parents, then immediate family, then grandparents.
• Couple with all four grandparents, if there are four. Do this early rather than late.
• Couple with siblings only.
• Couple with the wedding party, all together.
• Couple with each side of the wedding party separately.
• Couple with the children.
• Any grouping that exists for one specific person: the godmother, the aunt who raised you, the friend who came from Australia.

Then stop. Anything beyond that is better taken informally during the evening, when people are relaxed and nobody is standing in a line squinting into the sun.

Three rules that keep it under twenty minutes

First, nominate somebody who is not getting married to call the names. One person, loud, who knows the family and is not on the list for most of it. A cousin is ideal. The photographer cannot do this job and the couple certainly cannot, because the couple is in every single photograph.

Second, tell everybody on the list in advance, individually, that they are on it and where to be. A message the week before saying that group photographs are straight after the ceremony by the olive trees and it will take twenty minutes is the difference between fifteen people already standing there and a search party.

Third, put it in the schedule as a block with a start and an end, not as a thing that happens after the ceremony. It goes on the timeline next to everything else, which is the argument for having a photo plan for the weeks before the day at all.

How long the block really takes, and where to do it

Do the arithmetic before you write the list, because the arithmetic is what decides whether the plan was ever realistic.

A grouping takes about two minutes once you count calling the names, waiting for people to move, arranging them, taking three or four frames and letting them go. Fifteen groupings is thirty minutes rather than twenty, and every one where somebody has to be found adds another two. A list of fifteen with two people missing is closer to thirty five minutes, which is most of a cocktail hour.

If that is longer than you want, cut groupings rather than hurrying. A rushed photograph of eleven relatives has somebody blinking in it, and you will be able to name that person for the rest of your life.

Where you do it matters nearly as much. You want open shade rather than direct sun, because direct sun means everybody squints and half the faces sit in hard shadow. You want a background that is one thing, a wall or trees or the sea, rather than a car park with a marquee in the corner. And you want it within thirty seconds of where people already are, because a group that has to walk anywhere loses four members on the way.

Have an indoor answer ready as well. Rain at four in the afternoon is the most common reason this block collapses, and the version where somebody is deciding where to stand while eighty people wait in a doorway is the worst twenty minutes of the day.

Where it goes wrong

Divorced parents are the common one and they are easily handled if you decide in advance rather than in the moment. Write down whether the two of them appear in a frame together. Tell the caller. Nobody has to have a conversation about it at the time, which is the entire point.

The other one is the list that grows. Every grouping added at the last minute costs two to three minutes with setup, so five extra requests from relatives is a quarter of an hour of your cocktail hour that you will not get back. It is reasonable to say the list is closed.

And somebody will be missing. There is always one. Agree in advance that the caller moves on after thirty seconds and comes back to it, rather than holding eighty people while somebody finds the bathroom.

What everybody else is doing during those twenty minutes

Here is the part no shot list mentions. While fifteen relatives are being arranged, the other eighty guests are standing about with drinks in their hands and phones in their pockets, in the best light of the entire day, next to everybody they have not seen for five years.

That is reliably one of the richest twenty minutes of the wedding and none of it is on anybody's list. The photographer is busy, correctly, with the formal groups. Everything happening behind them is being recorded by guests or not at all.

It is also the moment guests are most likely to use a shared gallery if there is one, because they are standing still with nothing to do. If you are setting one up, that is where the card wants to be. We wrote more about how guest photographs sit alongside the professional set, and there is a short guide for the guests themselves that is worth sending round.

The formal list gets you the photographs you are supposed to have. The twenty minutes around it gets you the ones you did not know to ask for.