Make QR Cards for Every Student from a Roster in the Printcart Dashboard

This guide is for school and studio photographers who need a printed card for every student on picture day. The free Bulk QR page on printcart.com only counts your rows. Cards are made in the Dashboard.

What you need before you start

• A Printcart account with a connected store, and tokens in your balance. Bulk QR costs 1 token per student. New to tokens? See Choose which store your tool results are saved to.
• A roster with three things per student: an ID, a name and a class. A spreadsheet is fine. You will paste plain lines, not upload the file.
• A printer for A4 paper and a phone or scanner app to test the codes. The cards in this guide use made-up names.

From roster to printed cards

Expected result: a page called Bulk QR with a form on the left and an empty preview on the right.

Expected result: your store name shows next to "Results are attached to". The price box says "—" until you add students.

STU-2026001, Oscar Tate, Year 5A
STU-2026002, Avery Whitfield, Year 6B

• Leave out the header row (the line with "id, full_name, class"). In our first test the form counted it as a student, printed a card for it and charged 1 token. The page now says a header row is skipped, but we did not retest it, so check that the preview count equals your number of students.
• Use commas. The form now says commas, tabs or semicolons work. We only tested commas, so if you paste from Excel and the preview says "0 subject(s)", save the sheet as CSV or replace the separators with commas.
• Keep three columns. The third part is printed under the name as the class. If your CSV has an email in third place, the email is what the preview shows as the class.

Expected result: a block of lines such as the example above, with no header.

The preview on the right (7) lists every student it found. The price box (5) shows the cost: 12 students, 12 tokens.

Expected result: the preview shows "Preview (12 subject(s))" and the price matches the number of lines.

Expected result: a green message "Generated PDF for 12 subject(s)" and a Download QR card PDF button next to the preview.

Expected result: each card has the school name, a QR code, the student's name and class, and the ID in small grey text.

{"sid":"STU-2026001","jid":"PICTURE-DAY-2026-10","n":"Oscar Tate"}

This is not a web link, so a phone camera shows the text instead of opening a page. Use a scanner app, or your own software that reads the ID, to sort the photos.

Expected result: your scanner shows the ID and name that are printed on the card.

Before and after

Before: 12 lines of text in a spreadsheet. After: 3 A4 pages with 12 cards, made in one click for 12 tokens. A new run with the same Job ID costs tokens again.

Troubleshooting (what actually went wrong in our tests)

• "0 subject(s)" and an empty preview. Your lines may use a separator the form does not read, or have an ID but no comma. Use commas between ID, name and class.
• A card with "id" or "full_name" on it. The header row was pasted and counted as a student. Remove it before you generate, and check the preview count.
• Long names. In our second test a school name of 58 characters wrapped onto three lines on every card, and a student name of about 70 characters shrank onto two lines. Nothing was cut off. Still look at the PDF before you print a whole class.
• Characters the cards cannot print. Vietnamese and Spanish accents printed correctly. When we pasted Japanese characters and an emoji, the page refused to generate, listed the characters that cannot be printed, and charged nothing. Replace those names with Latin text, or leave the name out and rely on the ID.
• The same ID twice. The page shows a warning ("Duplicate student ID") but still made both cards, each with the same ID. Fix the IDs in your sheet first, because photos cannot be matched to the right person otherwise.
• Privacy of the PDF. In our first test the download link opened without signing in and its name was built from the Job ID. In our second test the file name had a long random ending, so the link cannot be guessed, but anyone who has the link can still open it without signing in. In the first test the student's name was also inside each code (we did not decode the new file). Do not put a student's name in the Job ID, share the file only with your team, and do not post the cards or the link in public places.
• Very large rosters. The form showed a price for 500 rows, and for 502. We did not run those batches, so we cannot tell you whether a very large run succeeds in one go. Try 100 first.

FAQ

How much does Bulk QR cost?

1 token per student. The price box shows the total before you click. A job of 12 students took 12 tokens and one of 6 took 6.

Can I upload a CSV file?

Not at the moment. You paste lines into the roster box. A CSV opened in a text editor works, as long as you remove the header and keep three comma-separated columns.

Do I need a Premium plan?

No. The 4-up layout is included. Single-card and 9-up layouts need a Premium plan.

Is there a free version?

The Bulk QR page lets you paste a list and see how many rows it finds. Nothing is generated there.

Can I match the cards to faces afterwards?

Cards help you name the files on picture day. For sorting event photos by person, see AI Face Matching for Event and School Photography.

Next steps

• Back to the tool page: Bulk QR card generator.
• Crop every portrait to the same frame: Auto Face Crop for School and Studio Photos.
• Older overview of the same tool: Generate Bulk QR Cards for Photo Fulfillment.
• More in this series: Photo commerce tools tutorials.

Process whole classes and keep your tokens topped up. See the token plans: AI wallet pricing.