The Public Wall, a Shareable Story Page, and a QR Code for a Gravestone

Search "QR code for gravestone" and you'll find plenty of engravers who'll print one for you — but usually little guidance on what it should actually point to, who should be able to reach it, or how it relates to anything else you might have already set up online. These are four related but genuinely different things, and mixing them up is where most of the confusion comes from.

A private legacy record is the base layer: your checklist, your pointer notes on where things are kept, your own written story, and any video messages you've recorded. This lives entirely behind your login, visible to no one, until you decide otherwise.

A shareable public story page is a single, dedicated link — in MyLegacyLivesOn's case, something like mylegacyliveson.com/s/[your-id] — that shows your story, your video messages, and any reference links you've added, to anyone who has the link. It's opt-in and reversible: you can flip it back to private at any point while you're alive, and it works whether or not you ever appear anywhere else on the site. Sharing this link directly with family is often enough — you don't need to be listed publicly anywhere for people who already have the link to read it.

The public Wall is a different, separate opt-in: an aggregated browse page listing everyone who's chosen to appear on it, split between people currently living and those who've passed. It's the difference between a link you hand to specific people and a public gallery anyone can browse and discover. You can have a public story page without ever appearing on the Wall, and the two settings are controlled independently for exactly this reason — some people want a link to share, not a public listing to be found through.

A QR code for a grave or memorial plaque is simply a printable image of your public story page's link, sized and formatted for an engraver. Anyone who scans it with a phone camera lands directly on the story page — no app, no login, nothing to type. It only works once the story page it points to is actually set to public; a QR code pointing at a private page is just a broken link carved in stone.

A common gap worth naming directly: most QR-for-headstone services require the account holder to generate the code themselves, while they're alive — which means if nobody thought to do it in advance, the family is often left with no way to create one after the fact, because there's no account to log back into. Look for a generate-a-QR-code feature that also works from the public story page link itself, not only from a locked account, so a family isn't stuck starting from zero after a loss.

Putting it together, in order: write and save your story privately first. When you're ready, decide whether it should be a shareable public link, an aggregated public Wall listing, both, or neither — these are separate switches, not one setting. If you want a physical marker, generate the QR code from the public link once it's live, and keep the digital and physical versions pointing at the same place. None of this needs to be figured out in a hurry, and all of it can be changed later — that's the point of doing it while there's no urgency at all.

This is a planning summary, not a legal document. If any part of your public story includes copyrighted material — a photo you didn't take, an article you didn't write — confirm you have the rights to share it before making anything public.