QR Codes at Weddings: What Guests Actually Do With the One on the Table

QR codes are old technology that had a bit of a renaissance in the last 10 years. Now that everyone carries a camera phone with them anywhere they go, they're simply the most convenient way to open a website, join a wifi or look at a restaurant menu. They have become so ubiquitous that no one bats an eyelid at them any more, even in a formal setting like a wedding dinner table.

I think about wedding QR codes far more than is healthy, because they provide a way into QuizYourGuests, the wedding quiz platform I built. I want to convince you that your wedding will be better with one of those codes on each table. And that guests will have more fun with it.

What couples put behind the code

QR codes are essentially just web addresses, and they can link to anything:

• Photos. The most common at weddings. A shared album or a photo app where guests add the pictures from their own phones.
• A general wedding website. Timings, directions, the taxi number, an Instagram page.
• Finding your seat. A searchable table plan instead of a crowd around the board by the door.
• The menu and the order of the day. Especially useful if you're at a restaurant and guests want to look at the wine list.
• Games. A quiz, a trivia round, a guess-the-baby-photo.
• Song requests for the DJ or band.
• The gift list or a honeymoon fund, though this one is better on the invitation than on the dinner table.

The trap is putting several codes on every table. Guests will scan one, maybe. But you might not have to choose (this is a not-so-subtle hint that you should keep reading).

How to print a QR code that actually scans

The dull practical bit, which is also where most of the failures are:

• Size. Keep it at least about 2.5 cm (an inch) across on a table card. Bigger if it's on a sign people will scan from a few steps away: a rough rule is that a code scans from about ten times its own width. A small code might look very readable to you, but camera phones often struggle to focus on small codes.
• Contrast. Dark code on a light background. Gold foil on cream looks beautiful and scans badly, especially by candlelight. White on dark sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, depending on the phone.
• Leave the border. QR codes need a blank margin around them. Designers love cropping it off to make the card tidier, and while that works on most modern phones, it can cause real issues with some models.
• Say what it does. "Scan for the photo wall" gets scanned, it's a simple call to action. A code with no words next to it gets scanned by the curious and ignored by everyone else, including every guest over sixty.
• Test it printed, not on screen. Try it on an iPhone and an Android phone, in dim light, from a normal sitting distance. Do this before you print a hundred of them.

One trap worth knowing about: plenty of "free" QR code generators make a dynamic code, which goes through their server so they can count scans. Some of them switch it off when a free trial ends, or put an advert in front of it. You can spot these sneaky codes: when you scan one, your phone shows the generator's website name rather than the address you expected. Use the code your wedding tool gives you, or create a static one with a trustworthy generator like genqrcode.com.

Where to put it

Put it where people already stop and wait:

• On every table, on a small card or on the place cards themselves.
• By the bar, where people queue with nothing to do.
• Next to the guest book, which people approach with a pen and a spare minute.
• On the order of service or the menu, if they're printed.

A single sign at the entrance is where QR codes go to die. People arrive in a group, talking, looking for someone they know, and walk straight past it. At our own wedding we had the codes on business cards in a basket by the entrance and by the guest book, and they did get picked up. But a card by the guest book is still a stopping point, which is the whole trick.

QR photo walls: why guests scan it and then don't upload anything

This is the real problem with QR codes for wedding photos, and it isn't a technology problem. Guests scan the code, see an upload page, think "oh nice, I'll do that later", and put their phone away.

Three things get in the way:

1. Your guests are having a great time. Uploading is not everyone's highest priority. Give them a reason!
2. Guests can't see anyone else's pictures. No one wants to post into the void, and guests might think they're the only ones doing it. This is particularly true for disposable camera apps, where the photos are intentionally hidden.
3. Choosing is effort. It's the same choice paralysis people have when posting to social media. The right photo is one in a hundred.

The fixes follow from that:

• Make the photos visible on the day. A live wall, on a screen if the venue has one, changes the behaviour completely. A photo that appears in front of the room gets pointed at, laughed at, and answered with another photo. The first few photos are the hardest, so ask one enthusiastic friend to go first.
• Give them a reason now. A prompt helps ("the best photo of the first dance wins a bottle of something"). Points help more, if you're running a game anyway. Did I mention that I'm running a wedding game website?
• Mention it once, out loud. One line in a speech ("please send us your best pics, we'd love to see what we're missing on the other tables!") does more than any sign.
• Keep it open until the next morning. Some of the best photos get shared over breakfast, by the people who were too busy dancing.

It does work. QuizYourGuests has a built-in photo wall feature, and guests use it a lot. It combines a unified QR code for multiple wedding-related features with an easy Instagram-like interface and gives guests a solid incentive (via points and bragging rights) to upload their photos.

Collecting the photos afterwards

Whatever you use, check what happens to the photos after the wedding. The questions that matter:

• How do you get them all in one go? A download link for the whole lot, not photo by photo.
• At what quality? Compression makes sense, but in some cases websites try to save storage at the expense of a good photo. Fine for a screen, disappointing for the album you meant to print.
• How long are they kept? Some free plans delete the gallery after a few weeks.
• Can you share them with the family? Your aunt is not going to download a 300 MB zip file. A page she can open and scroll through is what actually gets forwarded around.
• Are they going to upcharge you after the event? Watch out for 'give us money to download more than X files' tricks. It's an unwelcome thing to discover on the first day as a married couple.

Where QuizYourGuests fits

Disclosure: this is what I build, so expect some bias :)

QuizYourGuests is one QR code for the whole wedding. Guests scan it, type their name, and they're in: no app, no account. Behind that one code are the quiz, a live photo wall, a find-your-seat page and the order of the day.

The photo wall is our answer to the upload problem. Each photo a guest adds earns points for their team, which is what finally makes people do it rather than meaning to. Photos appear on the wall straight away, and guests can add them from an hour before the start until twelve hours after the end.

The morning after, every host gets an email with the photos and the final scores, with a link to download the full set in one go. The link needs no login, so you can forward it to whoever wants the photos.

All of that is in the free version, with no guest limit. Try the demo to see what a guest sees after scanning, or read what wedding guests taught us about quizzes if you're weighing up the quiz half as well.