Wedding Apps

This post is somewhat of a continuation on having a plugged-in wedding. I already noted that I wanted to encourage the use of cell phones and cameras during our wedding—especially during the reception. To try to get more people to take pictures, I created the I Spy cards I told you about earlier. But then of course there's the issue of actually getting the pictures.

Many of our friends and relatives have smartphones, so we looked into paid apps like Wedding Snap or Snap the Wedding. In the end, we just didn't want to allot any amount of money towards this when 1. We were already paying a professional photographer and 2. We weren't sure how many people would actually download the app and take pictures with it. We also weren't sure about those who had cameras—why pay for a service when only half of the guests at the wedding could use it?

We moved on from this idea and set about creating a wedding website. We decided on mywedding.com (more on how we chose a wedding website later). While setting up our free website, we noticed that they had a wedding app available for download and integration, at no extra cost. Thinking it probably wasn't all that great, I downloaded it to test it anyway.

Kind of a cute icon! Once you open up the app and join our wedding, you see a screen like this.

I really love the look of the app. I think it's streamlined and cute without being overpowering. There's also the option to post pictures or add a note by both the app creator or the guests. Here you can see a picture that I posted with the options to add a photo or a note at the bottom of the page.

Guests can like or comment on pictures—similar to Facebook. In fact, there's optional Facebook integration throughout the app. Furthermore, as the app creator, I have the option on each post to delete, share on Facebook, save the photo, or tag people in the photo.

I invited a people to test drive the app with me—so I have a few "guests" on my guest page.

So far I am loving it! I am really excited about being able to use this for our wedding. The tricky part will be encouraging guests to download the app (it's a free download available both in the App Store and Google Play) and encouraging them to take pictures through the app or use the app to upload photos. The current plan is to hand out small cards with app information, and it's on our website too of course.

For our guests don't have smartphones, I want to encourage them to still take and share pictures—but we're still working out that aspect! So far all I have is manually uploading them to Facebook and tagging us, using a hashtag, or emailing them to our wedding address. Any other suggestions?

Pictures can be viewed "timeline" style on the app, or on our website as a photostream. Hypothetically, we could invite people who weren't able to be at the wedding to view pictures in live time on their smartphones or online. I'm thinking about asking a few people to be especially diligent about snapping pictures! Of course, we'll try to upload pictures to Facebook as well.

Whew. That's all I've got. Now, you tell me. Has anyone used this or any other apps at their wedding? Did you have success with it?