Fifty links for a catalogue, without losing track

Shortening fifty links takes about ten seconds. Knowing, six weeks later, which of the fifty codes belongs to which product takes planning you have to do beforehand — and the failure mode is not dramatic, it is just a folder of identical-looking QR codes and a slow afternoon scanning them one at a time to find out.

Start with the source list, because everything downstream inherits its quality. One URL per line, each with its scheme included, deduplicated before you paste. Two identical lines produce two separate short links with two separate click counts, and merging those numbers afterwards is manual work that nobody enjoys. If your list lives in a spreadsheet, upload the CSV instead and let a column named "url" be detected — that keeps your product names sitting next to the URLs, which turns out to matter in a moment.

Run the batch, and then take the CSV download rather than only copying the links. This is the step people skip and regret. The CSV pairs each original URL with its new short link, and once the page is closed it is the only record of that mapping you have. Put it next to the spreadsheet the URLs came from, and your product names, your destinations and your short links are now one joinable table.

Be aware of the trade-off you accepted by working in bulk: these links get generated aliases, not custom ones. That is fine for a code somebody scans off a shelf edge, and wrong for anything a customer reads and types. If three of your fifty are going on a poster where the address is printed in text, create those three individually and give them names.

For the codes themselves, the batch download hands you a ZIP of PNGs named qr-01.png upward, numbered in the order you entered them. That numbering is the only thing tying a file back to its source, which is the second reason to keep your input list in the same order you pasted it. A folder of fifty codes with no accompanying list is fifty codes you have to scan to identify.

Rename them before you send anything to a printer. It costs a few minutes with the CSV open beside the folder, and it converts a numbered pile into filenames a designer can lay out without asking you twice. It also survives the file being emailed onwards without your spreadsheet attached.

Then test one code properly before printing all fifty. Print a single code at the final size on the actual stock, and scan it with an old phone in the lighting the codes will really live in — a shelf edge, a warehouse, an evening dining room. Batch mistakes are the expensive kind precisely because they are uniform: a contrast or quiet-zone error does not ruin one card, it ruins the whole run.

Afterwards, the links keep counting on their own. Each is an ordinary short link with its own statistics, so comparing which products actually got scanned is a matter of reading numbers rather than setting anything else up. Look at the shape rather than the totals — printed codes produce a low, flat line that continues for months, so judging a shelf campaign after one week tells you nothing at all.