A wedding photographer walkthrough — Help

Most help articles in this section cover one feature at a time. This one's different. It walks through using 1pm end-to-end as a wedding photographer running your own clients: the enquiry, the consultation, the proposal and signed agreement, the deposit, the wedding-day timeline, the second shooter, and getting paid. If you shoot weddings and you've been juggling a booking tool, a separate contract app, and a timeline you build in a spreadsheet, this is how the whole thing collapses into one place.

The distinction that matters for a photographer is that you're a supplier, not the venue. The couple came to you for the images, the day happens somewhere you don't own (often several somewheres), and the relationship is long: you're booked a year or more out and you deliver weeks after the day. So the workflow below is built around your client and your coverage, with the wedding-day timeline as the instrument you already live and die by.

If you're new to 1pm, this article assumes you've signed up and you're looking at the Leads inbox you land on. If you've used the app for a while, treat it as a sample workflow; you'll recognise the individual features from other articles.

The example throughout is a full-day wedding: ten hours of coverage with a second shooter, getting-ready at the couple's hotel, a garden ceremony, and a barn reception, booked fourteen months out. The same workflow runs an elopement, a two-hour engagement shoot, or a destination weekend.

The shape of a wedding photographer's job

A wedding photography job has a few traits that shape the workflow. The client is the couple, and the relationship runs long, so the record has to hold the whole arc, not just the day. You don't own the venue, and a wedding often moves across three or four of them in a single day, so the day itself is a moving timeline rather than one room. The money sits in a package with a deposit to hold the date and a balance before the day, often across a couple of staged payments. And the wedding-day timeline is your core deliverable: you build it with the couple, it doubles as your shot plan, and every other supplier keys off it. Getting that timeline right is most of the job.

The phases we'll work through:

Capture the enquiry.
Reply and book the consultation or engagement shoot.
Send the proposal, sign the agreement, take the deposit.
Set up the wedding and its locations.
Build the run of show with the couple.
Add your second shooter and share the timeline.
Run the day off the live link.
Invoice the balance and get paid.

Capture the enquiry

Most wedding enquiries arrive as a message: a form fill, an email, an Instagram DM. Put the embeddable enquiry form on your website (article 97) and enquiries stop scattering across your inbox and start landing in one place: the Leads inbox (article 98). Each carries the couple's names, the wedding date, and their message, and any custom fields you added to the form (venue, budget, how they found you) come with it. A live count badge in the sidebar shows new ones the moment they land.

If the enquiry came in some other way, a referral or a walk-up, add it by hand and it lands in the same inbox. The inbox is a pipeline with tabs (New, Qualified, Converted, Lost, Spam), so a season's worth of enquiries stays as one tidy funnel instead of a mailbox you're scared to open.

Reply and book the consultation

Click an enquiry to open the two-way email thread and reply from inside 1pm (article 99). Their reply threads straight back in, so the whole conversation lives on the lead. Reply templates with merge fields ([first name], [event date]) make the "thanks for reaching out, here's how I work" reply two clicks rather than a retype.

When you're ready to talk, put your booking page in front of them (article 132) and let the couple pick a slot themselves for a video consultation or an engagement shoot, in person, by phone, or over video. Every appointment lands on your calendar in its own availability band, sends its own confirmation and reminders, and never clashes with a wedding you're already shooting.

Send the proposal, sign the agreement, take the deposit

This is the part that replaces the stack of separate tools. Build a proposal (article 113): a branded, block-built web page laying out your packages, coverage hours, albums, prints, travel, with the couple able to read it at a private link. Prefer plain numbers? Raise a quote instead (article 103). Either way, when they're ready to book you turn it into a confirmation (article 109): the details and the pricing on one signable page, carrying your booking agreement from your terms and conditions library (article 121). The couple signs off online, which locks the confirmation as a record with their names and a timestamp. That signed confirmation is your contract.

Attach a deposit to it (article 110), the retainer that holds the date, as a percentage or a fixed amount with a due date. 1pm splits the total into deposit and balance and tracks each as paid or outstanding. If you run a payment plan, you can stage more than one payment, and you can save the couple's card on file (article 122) to take the balance later without chasing them for card details again. A signed agreement plus a paid retainer is a booked wedding.

Set up the wedding and its locations

Converting the lead matches or creates the contact and prefills the event with the names and date you already captured (article 100). Open it and fill the fields that matter for a photographer:

Name and Date. The couple and the day in whatever shorthand you'll recognise on a busy list. The wedding date goes here; your editing and delivery deadlines live on tasks, not by moving the event date.
Status. A new enquiry sits at Enquiry, moves to Tentative when you've pencilled the date, Confirmed once the retainer's in and the agreement's signed, and Completed once you've delivered the gallery.
Client and Organizer. The couple is the Client. If a wedding planner or the venue's coordinator is running the day, set them as the Organizer, so their number shows on the briefing header of every link and you always know who to call when the ceremony's about to start.
Locations as Spaces. A wedding day travels: getting-ready hotel, ceremony, reception. Save each place you shoot at as a Space (article 58) with its address, its parking and access notes, and what you need to remember about the light and the coordinator. The venues you shoot at repeatedly then autocomplete on the next couple's booking. Set the day's main venue as the event's Space and mark each location move on the timeline below, since the day itself does the travelling.

Build the run of show with the couple

Click into the event to open the planner. This is the wedding-day timeline you're known for, and in 1pm it's the run of show. Build it with the couple, typing it in with the + Insert row or pasting a draft you've drafted together from a spreadsheet (article 13).

A typical full-day timeline:

12:00pm Getting ready, bride's suite, detail shots (dress, rings, invitation flat-lay).
1:30pm Groom prep, second shooter covers.
2:30pm First look, garden.
3:00pm Travel to ceremony.
3:30pm Ceremony.
4:00pm Confetti, then family formals.
4:30pm Couple portraits, golden-hour slot held.
5:30pm Reception room details before guests are in.
6:00pm Guests seated, speeches.
7:30pm Cake, first dance.
9:00pm Sparkler exit if the light holds.
10:00pm Coverage ends.

Put the shot list and the must-haves in each item's Details field, which is where a timeline turns into a shot plan (article 69, with formatting in article 129). A "Family formals" item might read: "1. Couple with both sets of parents. 2. Bride with her grandmother (frail, do her first). 3. Whole wedding party." Multiple items at the same time are fine when you and the second shooter split, groom prep against bridal details. Note the address on the item where the day changes venue.

The point that lands with couples: they see this same timeline live. When the ceremony runs ten minutes late and you drag the reception items, the couple's phone and the planner's update within seconds, so nobody's working off a printed schedule that's already wrong.

Add your second shooter and share the timeline

Open the Crew accordion on the planner and add your second shooter and any assistant (article 67). If they've worked with you before they're already in your Contacts with tags, so typing "second shooter" surfaces your regulars first. On each timeline item set the Responsible person, so your second shooter's live link highlights their slice of the day (groom prep, wide angles through the ceremony) with the rest as context. Give them a private brief where it helps (article 21): "Shoot wide during the vows, I'm on the 70-200 for tight. During the first dance, get the parents' faces."

Then share the day:

Each crew member gets a personal live link from the Crew accordion (article 10). Regulars should bookmark their crew portal, the single link that lists every wedding you've put them on (article 59), so you're not sending fresh links before every job.
The couple, the planner, the videographer, and the venue all get the one public read-only link for the whole event (article 34). Everyone runs the day off the same timeline instead of five slightly different spreadsheet versions.

Run the day

On the day, keep your live link open on your phone. Tap Start and Mark finished as you move through the timeline (article 27) and it refreshes in real time (article 12). The header counts down to the next block, so a portrait session at plus-eight minutes is your cue to wrap and move everyone to the reception. If anything slips, drag the affected items and every phone, the couple's, the second shooter's, the planner's, updates within seconds. And because the timeline caches on the device, it still reads on a barn's patchy wifi.

Invoice the balance and get paid

The retainer came in at signing. Invoice the balance before the day (or on your own terms) from the event's Billing page: copy the charges to a draft invoice, which freezes a snapshot so a later tweak can't rewrite an issued invoice, then issue it and send it as a branded web invoice (article 103). The couple pays online by card if you've connected Stripe (article 104), or you charge the card they saved on file (article 122), or you record a bank transfer yourself. Part-payments and payment plans track automatically, and the invoice marks itself Paid when it's settled. Album upgrades and extra-hour add-ons go on as their own lines.

After the wedding

Set the status to Completed once you've delivered the gallery. It drops off your active list but stays on the couple's history in full.
Save the event as a template (article 50). Your standard full-day timeline and your package pricing become a starting point on the next booking, not a rebuild, and over a season you'll have a template per package.
Watch the season. The Calendar (article 105) shows your whole book at a glance, colour-coded by status, so you can see what's confirmed and where the open Saturdays are. The Reports hub (article 106) gives you bookings and pipeline value, revenue invoiced and outstanding, an overdue chase list, and your enquiry conversion rate, all exportable to CSV.

Where a wedding photographer gets the most out of 1pm

Two places. The client side, the enquiry, the proposal, the signed agreement, the deposit, the payment plan, and the invoice, all lives on one record per couple, so you stop paying for and stitching together a separate booking tool, contract tool, and payment tool. And the wedding-day timeline, the thing you're already best at, stops being a static PDF you email a week out and becomes a live plan the couple, your second shooter, and every other supplier read off in real time. Capture, propose, sign, shoot, get paid, one place, from the first enquiry to the final invoice.

For the day itself from the whole-wedding angle, every supplier and department rather than just your coverage, the wedding-day walkthrough (article 32) goes wider.