# QR Code Scanner

A QR code scanner that reads a code from a screenshot or photo and shows what it says before you go there. No camera needed, and nothing is uploaded.

Canonical page: https://filetity.com/qr-code-scanner

## Capabilities

- Free: Yes, with no watermark and no page limit.
- Account required: No. There is no account system.
- Processed on device: Yes. The file is read by your browser and never uploaded. There is no server to send it to.
- Formats: Any image a browser can open: PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF, BMP, and a screenshot pasted or saved. One code per picture, the first one found.
- Limits: QR codes only, not barcodes. A blurred photo, a code cut off at the edge or heavy glare on a screen can defeat it, and it says so rather than sitting there.
- Mobile: Yes, on any modern mobile browser. Large files are limited by the memory the phone gives the browser.
- Offline: Yes, once the page has loaded. The tool keeps working with no network connection.

## Questions

### Why read a code here instead of pointing my phone at it?

Because a phone opens it and this does not. A QR code is unreadable by eye, which is the entire mechanism behind the malicious ones: the destination is invisible until you have already arrived. Here the text is shown as text, and you decide afterwards. It also works on a laptop, where there is no camera pointing at the poster.

### It says the link goes to a shortener. Why does that matter?

Because a shortened link is not the destination, it is a redirect to one, and the real address is not in the code at all. Nothing here or in your camera can see through it without following it. A code that could have carried the real link and carries a bit.ly instead has hidden something, deliberately or otherwise, and that is worth a second thought before you follow it.

### Can it read a barcode?

No. A barcode and a QR code are different symbologies read by different algorithms, and this one only does QR. The barcode generator on this site writes Code 128 and EAN, and reading those from a photograph is a harder problem than writing them.

### Nothing was found. What usually causes that?

A photograph of a screen, most often, where the moire pattern and the glare defeat the grid detection. A screenshot of the same code reads immediately. After that: a code cropped at the edge, so a corner square is missing, and a picture too small for the modules to be distinct.

## Related tools

- [QR Code Generator](https://filetity.com/qr-code-generator): Generate a QR code from a link or text, and save it as a PNG or an SVG.
- [Image to Base64](https://filetity.com/image-to-base64): Turn an image into base64 or a data URL for CSS, HTML or JSON.