The ceremony has a fixed, non-negotiable start time: the venue, the officiant, and the guests all agree to it in advance. So everything else on the timeline gets scheduled around it, and the getting-ready shots, the first look, and the wedding party photos are all worked out backwards from that one anchor. Daymarked can do that working-out for you.
How Daymarked builds it for you
On a brand-new timeline, this is the first thing Daymarked offers: enter the ceremony time, tick First Look if there is one, and click Build my timeline. See your first timeline for that walkthrough — that first offer works on your phone too. The rest of this article covers reaching the same build later, on a timeline you have already started, on a computer or on your phone.
Place a single Ceremony block on an otherwise empty timeline and give it a start time. A prompt asks whether to build backwards from it. If you accept, it asks one more question, whether there's a first look, before generating the rest. On a phone, the question appears in a bar above the Add block button once you close the ceremony block.
With a first look, Daymarked chains First Look, Wedding Party Photos, Family Photos, and a Buffer / Break back-to-back before the ceremony, timed so the buffer ends exactly when the ceremony starts. Without one, it places the buffer before the ceremony and puts Wedding Party Photos and Family Photos right after it ends, on the assumption those happen post-ceremony instead. If the day already has some of these blocks, Daymarked leaves them out and keeps the rest at their usual times: a First Look, Wedding Party Photos, or Family Photos block anywhere in the day, or a Buffer / Break that already sits right before the ceremony. A Buffer / Break elsewhere in the day, such as a vendor meal, doesn't count.
Each block's length comes from your studio's own default for that type, where you've set one; otherwise it falls back to thirty minutes. You don't have to catch the prompt the moment you drop the ceremony block: the same prompt is available from the timeline's toolbar at any point once your ceremony has a start time (on a phone, open the ceremony block and tap Build backwards from this ceremony), so you can build the rest of the day out first and come back to it. To back out at the first-look question without creating anything, click Cancel (on a phone, tap ✕).
Placing that first ceremony block also unlocks the coverage window. Daymarked won't ask you about both at once: on a fresh ceremony block you see the backwards-build offer first, then the coverage placement nudge once that's settled.
Adjusting what it generates
What comes out is a normal set of blocks; nothing about them is locked in or special. On a computer, once they have landed, a short note reminds you that you can click any time to change it: click a block's start or end time, type the new one, and the block moves. Rename the blocks, or delete the ones you don't need. If the generated durations feel off across the board, your studio probably hasn't set default durations for those block types yet, which is why everything lands at the fallback thirty minutes. Setting your own defaults changes what future backwards-builds produce, on this wedding and the next one.
The backwards build never changes or removes a block already on the timeline. Running it again adds only what's missing, and if nothing is, Daymarked says so. The contextual prompt only offers itself when a ceremony is the sole block on the day, so once you've built from it and started adjusting, it stays out of your way. For everything else the editor can do, see the timeline editor.