Why photographers should use QR codes

There's a huge buzz about these things called QR Codes for marketing and driving people to your website. QR Codes are quickly becoming a very known thing. You see them everywhere you look. It's basically a fancy bar code that can link to your website or your contact information.

QR Codes were created by Toyota as a better bar code system and now they are used all over Japan by many business types. Read more about them at the links below

http://www.denso-wave.com/qrcode/index-e.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code

As a photographer I really like this QR code technology too, but not for the typical reasons of putting them on your marketing materials which is a great thing too.

The thing I'm excited about is putting them on my images that I publish on the web. My new photography studio policy is to watermark all my web images with my QR Code. This QR Code points to my mobile website http://m.waynewallacephotography.com

Using QR codes on photographs as a form of copyright identification

Why Should You Consider Do This Too?

Photographers have put traditional copyright stamps and or their logo on their pictures for years now as you see at the bottom of my image above.

If you think about it for a minute having a smart barcode on your image is way better than a traditional logo or copyright stamp. It's a smart barcode that points back to your website and it can be used to identify you as the copyright owner and creator of the image.

Also, it's my belief that as QR Codes become more popular Google and other search engines like Bing will start offering more services related to QR Codes and indexing them which could mean more traffic and exposure for you and your services.

The other obvious benefit right now is that if your image gets copied and posted on different web sites viewers can scan it with their smart phone and jump right to your website to see more of your work and possibly hire you.

I like using this QR Code reader on my iPhone it works great.

http://www.qrcodecity.com/

There are many readers and QR Code generators out there.

I used this one to create this QR Code

http://qrcode.kaywa.com/

Google has an app called Goggles which allows you to search the web based on a picture. If I take a picture of this blog post Google Goggles will even recognize the QR Code embedded in the image and provide a link to my website.

As we all know Google indexes images right now, but don't you think they can easily scan those images looking for QR codes embedded in them and provide additional related information to the web surfer? After all, Googles main job is to provide relavant search results, right?

http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/

I think QR codes are a great technology for photographers, what do you think?

Originally posted on blog.waynewallace.com   Take a moment to check them out!

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