Show HN: QRaro, store binary data into QR Codes and retrieve it later

This is great. Have you looked into QR code's structured append support? It provides the sequencing metadata required for reconstructing the data of multiple QR codes even if scanned out of order. It's limited and other schemes would still be valuable but it might still be worth supporting since it's native to the format.

Does it have camera support? I added binary decoding feature to zbar a few years ago, zxing already had it and seemed to be in far better shape overall but zbar had builtin camera support which was necessary for my use case.

I used to have a similar idea. In general, generate a series of QR codes for any file, and convert them into a GIF.

But then I quickly realized I probably have to design a metadata structure (e.g., how many total QRs, where is start, where is end, etc). I didn't continue after that :-P

Obviously this wouldn't scale in real world application, but it was a fun idea.

This reminds me of the Danmere Backer, a PC backup system that used VHS tapes.

https://linbacker.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html

Update: added qrtools as a second decoder; now you can use 1000 (or more) chunks per qrcode. The pika image included can now be stored in just (!!) 124 qr codes.

EDIT: And added gzip compression too

Why not just use base64 or something