QR codes for museums, galleries and visitor sites

A museum label has room for forty words and a curator has four hundred. A code on the label is the cheapest way to give the visitor the rest — context, a detail you cannot see from behind the barrier, the conservator's note, audio in their own language — without adding a single panel to the wall or renting a single audio handset.

The six codes worth printing

One code per job: the object, the room, the street poster, the outdoor trail, the ticket, the exit wall.

The object label with room for the whole story

Give each significant object its own code, pointing at a short mobile page: two paragraphs of context, one zoomable detail image, the audio, and a link to the next object on the route. Keep the printed label complete on its own — the code adds depth, it never replaces the information a visitor without a phone needs.

Because the destination is editable, new research and new translations appear behind a label printed five years ago. That is also what makes languages affordable: one page per object with a language switch, instead of five printed labels competing for the same wall space.

Audio guides without handsets

A code that opens an audio page on the visitor's own phone removes the hire desk, the cleaning, the batteries and the deposit. Two practical rules: say in print that headphones are welcome and provide a transcript on the same page, which serves visitors who cannot hear the audio and works when the gallery is noisy.

Panels that survive the next rehang

Rooms get rehung, loans go home, temporary shows rotate. A dynamic room code lets you retarget the panel the morning the new hang opens, so the printed panel is never wrong. Same logic for the street poster: when the exhibition closes, point the same code at the next one instead of at a page saying the show has ended.

Outdoor trails and heritage sites

On a trail, each marker gets its own code opening that stop's audio plus the direction to the next waypoint — the most useful thing you can give someone holding a paper map in the wind. Outdoors the rules of weather apply: matte laminate or engraved plate, never gloss, mounted at chest height and angled slightly down so rain runs off and the sky does not reflect into the camera.

Print widths from object label to street poster

Two gallery-specific traps. A label under a spotlight or behind glass reflects that light straight into the camera: print matte, and where the object is vitrined, put the code on the outside of the case, not inside it. And a label read from behind a barrier is a metre away, not thirty centimetres — measure the real distance a visitor can reach, not the distance from the label to the wall.

The exit wall: membership, donation, feedback

The exit is the one moment when the visitor has just decided whether they liked it. One code there — membership, donation, or a three-question survey — converts better than the same ask at the entrance, and can be retargeted by campaign without reprinting the wall.

Read the numbers like a visitor study

Object codes are the closest thing to a free attention study: which works people stop at, which rooms lose them, whether the trail is finished or abandoned at stop three. Use it to plan interpretation, not to judge visitors — and keep the promise honest: the reports count reads, they never identify the people who scanned.