Free wedding shot list generators, compared
There are a lot of these, most of them are free, and several are good. They mostly exist for one of two reasons: a photographer got tired of the same wedding-day problem and built a fix, or a wedding app built a free tool to bring people in the door. Both are fine reasons. Here's what each is actually good at.
The photographer-built generators
The most useful ones in this category were built by working wedding photographers who kept watching family formals fall apart.
Group Shot Star's free generator (by Nicholas Teal) is the strongest of them. You give it the couple's names and paste in a list of relatives; it sorts them, orders the shots, and handles divorced parents automatically. It can send the list straight to your photographer. The free tool feeds a paid app sold to photographers — see the full comparison.
Geoff Shaw's family photo list generator is one of many built by individual photographers to hand to their own clients. It takes your family roles and produces the recommended combinations. These are usually simple, usually good, and usually built for that photographer's own booking flow rather than as products.
What they're good at: they're built by someone who has stood in front of a stalled family group, so the shot order is right. That's the part generic templates get wrong.
Where they stop: almost all of them end at a printout or an email. The list is generated, not maintained.
The wedding-app front doors
Pix offers a free generator with 100+ suggestions across categories, with venue-specific options and progress that saves in your browser. Good coverage of the whole day rather than just formals. Full comparison: vs Pix.
Revel does the opposite — thin on the rest of the day, strong on family combinations, expanding names you type into every standard combination. Full comparison: vs Revel.
What they're good at: breadth, polish, and genuinely zero friction. No signup, works immediately.
Where they stop: they're funnels for a photo-sharing app, so they end where the photo-sharing app begins — at the printout.
The AI generators
Tools like ProShoot generate a shot list from a description of the event. Enter the event type and get a list organized by phase, with no signup.
What they're good at: a fast starting point when you're staring at a blank page, and they cover event types nobody has written a wedding template for.
Where they stop: they don't know your family. An AI can produce “couple with the bride's parents” — it can't know there are four parent tables, that one grandparent is leaving at eight, or that two of them shouldn't be in the same frame. Everything specific to your wedding still has to be typed in by you.
The thing they all have in common
Every generator on this page produces a list and then stops. That's not a flaw — generating the list is the job they set out to do, and the good ones do it well.
But the list isn't the point. The wedding day is. And on the wedding day the list is on paper in someone's bag, three weeks out of date, while a photographer who has never met your family tries to work out which one is Melinda.
That's the part this tool is built for: a list that stays live, that flags what matters, that your photographer ticks off from their phone, and that can show a face next to a name. The faces come with Seat the Day. Everything else is free.
Start here
If you just want a printable list right now, take one of the free templates — no email, no signup. If you want it to still be working on the day, build it here instead.
Based on each tool's public pages, checked September 2026. If you built one of these and I've described it wrong, tell me and I'll fix it.
Build your shot list free
No account needed to start. Add your shots, flag the ones that matter, share a link your photographer can check off on their phone.
Free forever. The paid tier lives inside Seat the Day.