So the first order of business is to label every box. The start of a proper inventory. The first idea I had where the stick sheets of A4 labels. You put these through a printer, slice it up and BAM, custom stickers. So a quick shell scripts later we have:

#!/bin/bash

for i in $(seq -f "%05g" 0 703)
do
  qrencode $i -o $i.png
  convert $i.png -gravity East -splice 100x0 -pointsize 20 -annotate +20+0 $i $i.png
  echo $i
done
montage *.png -tile 16x -geometry '+3+3>' page.pdf
convert page.pdf -units PixelsPerInch -density 400 page.pdf

This was printed out and a scalpel + patience resulted in:

These boxes along with a small jig was able to read the QR codes and take photos of the box contents.