How to read a QR code from an image or screenshot

Someone sends you a QR code and you need to know where it goes — before you print 2,000 flyers with it, or before you trust it. Pointing your phone at your own screen is awkward and often fails. Decoding the image directly takes a few seconds and shows the full payload, character for character.

Drop the image into the reader

Open the free QR code reader and drop the file into the box, or click it to pick a file. The image is drawn onto a canvas and decoded by your browser: nothing is uploaded, so there is no copy of the code, the poster or the contact card sitting on a server afterwards.

If the code is printed on something in front of you — a menu, a parcel, a letter — use "Scan with webcam" instead. The reader keeps sampling frames until it finds a code, then stops the camera on its own.

Read the payload, not just the link

The panel on the right splits what it found into readable fields, then shows the raw payload underneath. That distinction matters: a QR code can hold a Wi-Fi network with its password, a contact card, a phone number, a plain text note or a link with a long tail of tracking parameters. The raw box is the ground truth — it is what a phone actually receives.

• A link ending in ?utm_source=... is being tracked; the parameters tell you by whom and for which campaign.
• A Wi-Fi payload shows the network name, the security type and the password in clear text — which is why you never encode the till network.
• A contact card shows every field that will land in the phone's address book, including the ones the designer forgot to fill in.
• Plain text means the code opens nothing at all: it just displays the text.

Tell whether the code is static or dynamic

If the payload is a short redirect link on a QR provider's or shortener's domain, the code is dynamic: its owner can change where it points at any time, and probably counts every scan. The reader flags this for you. If the payload is the final, full URL — or raw text, a contact card, a Wi-Fi network — the content is baked into the grid and can never be changed.

This is the fastest way to audit a code you inherited. A supplier's "permanent" menu code that turns out to be a redirect on someone else's account is a code you don't control: if that account lapses, your printed menus stop working.

When it won't decode

Almost every failure is one of four things: the code fills too little of the image, the photo is blurry, there is glare across the modules, or the code was printed with too little contrast. Crop tightly around the code and try again — the reader already retries at several scales before giving up.