what are QR codes and how does my phone camera associate them with a link or URL
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A QR code is basically just a fancy barcode.
Look at any product and you will find a barcode on it somewhere – a pattern of white and black stripes designed so that a computer can easily scan it and tell what that item is. In this case the thickness of each bar corresponds to a digit between 0-9, so the computer scans it, reads out a number, and that number will refer to an item on a big list.
QR codes follow the same ideas, just a bit fancier. When the computer spots a QR code, or scans over the block and notes whether each square in the pattern is black or white, reading out a long number made up of ones and zeros – which it turns out is the same system computers use to store data.
So the same way a barcode reader will read out a ~13 digit number, a QR reader will read out a string of ASCII text (which can vary in length, up to a free thousand characters long for some larger format codes).
The reason you phone knows what these are is because it has been programmed to. In the same way that your camera will be programmed to recognise a face in an image, it will also recognise the distinctive patterns of a QR code and try to read it – if you look at different QR codes, you may see certain common details between them all, such as the same markers placed in the corners of each pattern that a camera can look for.
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