A background for video calls

How to make one, where to put the code, and the one thing that stops it working.

Making one

Open your card and use **A background for video calls**. Choose a corner and a size, and download a 1920×1080 image for Zoom, Teams, Meet or anything else that takes one.

A top corner is usually right. Your head and shoulders are in the middle and lower middle of the picture, and most conferencing apps put a name badge and a toolbar along the bottom edge.

Do not mirror it

Zoom's **Mirror my video** changes only what *you* see. Everybody else on the call sees you the right way round the whole time.

Several guides on the internet tell people to flip the image so the code looks correct in their own preview. That makes it unreadable for every person on the call, while looking right to the one person who is not going to scan it. If the code looks backwards to you, that is the correct state.

Why the code looks bigger than it needs to be

Because on a call it is not the size you are looking at. A call under any strain is transmitted well below the size you uploaded — often a third of it — and the compression used for video throws away fine black-and-white detail first, because it is tuned for faces and movement.

So the code carries only your card's address, at the highest error correction, in plain black on white with a full white margin, and it is drawn considerably larger than it looks like it needs to be. Choose **Larger** if the calls you are on are usually poor.

Upload it at full size and let the app scale it down. Uploading something smaller and letting a conferencing app enlarge it is the reliable way to end up with a code nobody can scan.

This is the part no other tool publishes anything about. Every product in this category offers the feature; none says whether the code survives the call, and at the sizes some of them use it often does not.