What someone sees when they scan the QR code
2 min read
Someone stands at a grave, points a phone at a small square, and something opens. This page is about what that something is — because families decide whether to buy one of these without ever having scanned one.
The first three seconds
The camera recognizes the code and offers a link. Tapping it opens a web page. There is no app to install, and on a well-made service there is no account to create either.
That last part matters more than it seems. A memorial page that asks a seventy-year-old at a graveside to create an account and confirm an email has already failed. The visit lasts four minutes; nobody is going to do admin.
What is on the page
It depends entirely on what the family put there. Typically, in the order people scroll:
- A photograph and a name, with the two dates.
- A short life: where they were born, what they did, who they loved. Five lines or five hundred words — both work, and the short one is read more often.
- Photographs, which is what most visitors came for.
- Tributes: messages left by other people who scanned before them. This is the part families underestimate, and the part that keeps the page alive.
- Sometimes recordings — a voice note, a song, a video of them talking.
Who can see what
Two models exist, and it is worth knowing which one you are choosing.
Open. Anyone who scans sees everything. Simple, and appropriate for a grave in a public cemetery — the people who stop there are people who knew them, or their descendants.
Restricted. Part of the page is behind a link or a code shared by the family. Useful when there are photographs of living children, or when the family would rather not have a life story sitting in public search results.
Neither is right in general. A page for a grandmother who died at ninety-two and a page for a child are not the same page.
What a visitor can do
On most services, a visitor can read. On the good ones, they can also add: a message, a photograph from their own collection, a memory nobody else had.
That is the difference between a memorial page and a printed card with a link on it. A page that only the family can write to is finished the week it is made. A page anyone who loved them can add to is still growing in ten years, and that is the only version of this that is worth paying for.