What are QR Codes?
QR Codes are basically a bar code which contains as much or as little information as a Company decides to put in them.
It could contain a website address, a simple message, a Company's contact details or even GPS coordinates of say an event that you might be hosting so that visitors could scan it and launch their GPS Sat Nav (Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, TomTom etc). Much easier than having to physically type in the gps coordinates!.
In our case, it’s our contact details ( our V-Card ) so your address book will open up with our details and you can either add it to your address book by saving it, update our contact details if you already have them stored or just cancel the entry.
How does one read a QR Code?
As most mobile phones have a built in QR Code reader in the camera app, all you have to do is to point your camera at the QR Code and a "pop up" will appear at the top of the screen telling you what type of QR Code it is and, by touching the pop up, it will activate it.
That's all good and dandy if you're using a QR Code on a Laptop / PC Screen, on a card, a leaflet etc but what if you're viewing the website on your mobile phone?
If you're viewing the website with an iOS device, all you have to do is to gently touch and hold the QR Code image and presto, a pop up from the bottom of the screen will appear telling you what type of QR Code it is (a website address, a V-Card etc) and asking you what you want to do with it!
If you're viewing the website with an android device, it's a little more complicated. The Samsung S22 will tell you that it's a QR Code image but that's it when it comes to reading the QR Code itself. It will give options like saving the image, forwarding it etc but nothing about the content inside the QR Code.
For this, you'll have to save the image to your device and then launch the Google Lens app and read the QR code from your image library. Sadly, the Google Lens app doesn't appear to be able to read all the information, just part of it like the phone number and email address. We don't know why this is!
If you know a better solution, please drop us an email so we an include it here.
The Google Lens - if you are already using the Google Assistant, you will find that you probably already have it. It looks like the image below and is normally located near the "microphone" image of the Google Assistant.The Google Assistant is the screen that shows up after saying "OK Google". However, it will only show up after the voice feature turns off.
