What to write when you share your wedding

A wedding gallery full of beautiful photographs is lovely to look at and almost useless to plan from. Another couple cannot tell where it is, what time of year it was, how many people were there, or who did the flowers.

A few sentences fix all of that. Here is what is worth writing down while you still remember it.

The practical facts first

Put these near the top, because they are the first things anyone scrolling is trying to work out:

• Where. The venue, and roughly where in the country it is.
• When. Month and year is plenty. Season changes everything about light, flowers and what people wore.
• How many. Ceremony numbers and evening numbers, if they differed.
• The shape of the day. Church then a drive? All in one place? Two days?

None of this is private information — it is on your invitations — and it saves the next couple a dozen questions.

Then the honest bit

The most useful line in any shared wedding is usually the one that admits something.

We moved the drinks reception indoors at the last minute and it was better than the plan.

We cut the sit-down starter and nobody noticed. We would do that again.

We booked a band for the whole evening and, honestly, an hour of it would have done.

Nobody is grading you. Somebody planning their own day is reading it, and what they want to know is what you would change.

Say what each supplier actually did

When you tag a supplier, add a sentence about the thing they did that mattered. Specifics travel:

• "Turned up at 6am to hang the installation and stayed until it was down."
• "Sent us a running order we could hand to the venue, which nobody else offered."
• "Let us swap two courses a fortnight out without a fuss."
• "Kept my dad talking for twenty minutes while I finished getting ready."

Compare that with "amazing, highly recommend". One of these gets your florist booked.

Choose photographs that show the day, not just the couple

Keep the portraits — of course keep the portraits — but a couple planning their own wedding is looking for different things:

• The room before anyone is in it, so they can see the space.
• A table, close enough to see what is on it.
• The ceremony from the back, so they can see how it was set out.
• The flowers in daylight.
• Something after dark, so they know what the lighting really looks like.

A word on what to leave out

Share what you are comfortable with and nothing more. You do not have to publish your budget, your guest list, your address or anyone's face who would rather not be there. You choose what appears; the useful parts of a wedding are almost never the private ones.

Why it is worth the half hour

Two reasons. The first is that somebody, probably several somebodies, will plan a better day because you wrote it down.

The second is that the suppliers who made your day get found — and on Wed you earn a flat £40 each time another couple books one of them. The suppliers you tag get a booking they would not have had, the next couple gets people who have been tested on a real wedding, and you get paid for the introduction you were going to make anyway.