Order of events during reception?

It depends on when you plan to do your pictures. If your plan is to get married at 6:30, do an hour of cocktails, and feed people at 7:30 that's doable (though kids may struggle with such a late meal). That puts your cake cutting pretty late though, I suspect some people will leave after dinner.

I chose a 5 pm ceremony; we're doing our pictures before but likely will get some afterward as well. Our guests can filter over to the reception for cocktails while we finish up (and clean up the few items we brought) and we'll hopefully get there at 6 for drinks with our guests, and dinner for us will be at 6:30. Then, cake at 7:15 and after that, it's just drinks and fun for whoever sticks around.

Our ceremony starts at 5:30 then cocktail hour, then 4 hour reception. So our will last until 11:00

Will depend on the length of your ceremony and cocktail hour. if it were me, I would go with 5pm. Our dinner will be served approximately 2 hours after the ceremony: 4:30 ceremony, 5:15-6:15 cocktail hour, 6:30 dinner.

ETA: I prefer to do toasts during dinner, which saves time.

At what point during the reception is dinner served? Immediately? Or is there something that goes on before? I'm just terribly confused about toasts, dancing ect. I believe we are doing pictures during cocktail hour and we have the reception space until 1230am.

Toasts happen usually as dinner wraps up. Dancing starts after dinner. Just make sure you have some kind of food at the cocktail hour and you should be fine with a 6:30. I am doing 6:30, partly because it's a Friday wedding.

Http://bridalguide.com/planning/wedding-reception/reception-procedures I was wondering this same thing last week and found this. It really helped me

Our ceremony starts at 6pm and the venue expects that to take 30 minutes. Our reception is 6:30-11:30, and we are supposed to have a cocktail hour with appetizers, probably putting dinner at 7:30pm. Dinner usually happens pretty close to the beginning of the reception. The introduction should take place before dinner, maybe during cocktail hour if your pictures don't take that long! My thoughts are that after a bunch of appetizers and dinner, guests are going to need some time to make room for dessert. This could be a great time to do your first dance, toasts, father-daughter and mother-son dances, etc. We haven't really thought a lot about how we want to schedule all of that. I don't want to do all of that stuff in one huge block, though, leaving my guests just to sit. I think I might want to do the toasts right after dinner, do the first dance, and then invite everyone to the dance floor. After a bit, we can pause the party to cut the cake and do the father-daughter and mother-son dances...and then resume the dance party! Of course, we're inviting kids, so maybe the cake cutting should happen a little earlier.

I would go with the 6:30 reception

ETA: sorry for the double posts, I was on mobile earlier and didn't feel like typing all that below haha

In my area, it goes:

1) Parent, bridal party intros, bride and groom intros

2) First dance

3) Welcome, MOH and BM toasts

4) Blessing and dinner

5) Special dances as dinner is ending

Now for cutting the cake, you can either cut it right after dinner and the special dances so that you can really just enjoy the rest of your reception or sometimes people open the floor for dancing, and then cut the cake about an hour before the reception ends. In my experience, cutting the cake earlier ensures that more people will eat it! As the night goes on, people will be focused on dancing and won't be at their seats to eat cake so it may go to waste. Also, older folks will leave earlier, so they may miss the cake cutting.

If you are doing a garter retrieval/toss and bouquet toss, that is also typically done later in the reception, about an hour before the reception ends. If you choose to cut the cake later, you could do the garter and bouquet tosses right after that.