The best wedding tech to help make your special day a success

Marriage, 21st-century style

It's the happiest day of your lives - probably - so why not pick out some gadgets and apps to make sure everything goes without a hitch? Here at T3 we live gadgets, and we also happen to have been to quite a few weddings, so we've got some tech ideas to share.

These tips cover all kinds of scenarios and budgets, so whatever you're planning, you should be able to find something you can use. We can't do anything for the best man's speech or the bar bill at the end of the night, but these ideas should inspire you...

Set up a wedding website

As soon as you've got a date in the calendar, get a website up and running - you can stick up details of all the arrangements, just in case they change last minute or your guests lose their invites, and you can even use it as a hassle-free way for people to send you an RSVP.

The good news is you don't need to be a professional coder to do this, though it helps if you are (or happen to know one). Plenty of places will host your site for free, including The Knot, Getting Married, Minted and MyWedding, with many more doing it for a small fee.

Stream all the action

No doubt you've got relatives and friends stuck in Australia or Cornwall who can't make it to the big day - but maybe they can watch everything live on the web or their phones instead? You don't have to do the job yourself: get your guests to share out the duties.

You've got no shortage of apps to pick from to stream the event live: Skype, FaceTime, Periscope, Hangouts, Instagram and more. If you have a 360-degree camera and a Facebook account, then your live wedding video stream can be truly immersive.

Get all your photos in the same place

You want to get all the snaps of your big day in the same place, but you don't want your smartphone passed around a hundred guests. An easy solution is to invite all your guests to the same Facebook group, and badger them to upload all their pictures into it.

Alternatively, advertise a wedding hashtag and get all your friends and family to use it - this means you can keep track of pictures across Twitter and Instagram. For something a little more private, you can set an album up in Google Photos and invite people to it.

Hire a photo booth

Another way of making sure you've got pictures of most of your guests, complete with some comedy blow-up props, is to hire a photo booth - a quick web search will reveal plenty of photo booth owners ready to turn up at your wedding and get some snaps.

Another option we've seen before is to buy a load of disposable film cameras and distribute them on the tables at the venue - you just need to make sure you (or your ushers) collect them all in at the end of the night, and then get them developed.

 Order a drone 

If you really want photos that stand out from all those other wedding pictures you're going to see this summer, buy or hire or borrow a drone. You can set it loose across the wedding and reception venues and get some special aerial shots to remember the big day by.

Of course this works better if your wedding is being held in a marquee in the middle of a field rather than on the fifth floor of a city centre hotel, but cut your cloth accordingly. If you can't use a drone at the wedding, maybe you can on the hen do or stag party instead.

Keep the cameras rolling

Finally on the topic of capturing photos and videos from the big day - besides the plethora of snaps and clips that are going to be saved to your phone - consider investing in (or borrowing) an action camera or two, which you can use to capture some rolling footage.

A tiny camera like the GoPro Hero5 Session would probably work best and you can stick it anywhere - like on the wedding cake or the best man's lapel. You could even pass the clips on to your wedding photographer, to be used in the official movie of your wedding day.

Set up a projector

You probably don't want to spend a hefty chunk of cash on a big-screen projector just for your wedding if you're never going to use it again, but if the venue or your office has got one you can borrow, it can come in handy all the way through your wedding day.

Set up photo slideshows or videos while people are milling around, let the speechmakers loose on it for their speeches, run a quiz about the happy couple, and so on. You can even show the big match live, if there happens to be a clash with a big sporting event...

Designated charging points

Of course you can't carry a mains power socket in your pocket during the wedding, but you might want to set up a few sockets at the venue with extension cables and maybe a charging cable or two, so people can top up their phone batteries while they're partying.

The longer people's phones last for, the more photos and videos you'll have to look back on, and the easier it'll be for people to call a taxi at the end of the night. As for your own phone, you could invest in a portable charger or a charging case to keep the juice flowing.

Strong Wi-Fi network

One of the essentials at any modern-day wedding - like a first dance and a cake cutting - is a strong Wi-Fi network. How are your guests expected to post updates to all the big social networks if they can't get signal? Check with your venue, preferably before you book it.

Alternatively, you could take the opposite approach and decide you really don't want everyone glued to their smartphones when they're supposed to be celebrating your big day with you... in which case the more rustic and rural the surroundings, the better.

Wi-Fi Image: Charleston's The Digitel/Flickr