Scan a QR code from an image already on your phone.

The camera and the screen face opposite ways

The phone showing the code is the phone you would have to point at it, and the main camera looks out of the back. No setting turns that around.

A second phone is still a camera pointed at a screen

A display is a grid of pixels and a camera sensor is another grid. Photograph one with the other and repeating bands settle over the picture.

Two things about that banding run against instinct. It is worst when the screen is dim, because a dim display spends longer with its pixels off. It is worse again in a bright room, where a short exposure cannot average the flicker out.

There may be no distance that works

A phone's main camera stops focusing at roughly a few centimeters. Move closer for pixels and the shot goes soft; back off to focus and the code is too small to decode.

What the phone already does on its own

Both platforms can already read a code out of a picture, and both are quiet about it.

On iOS, press and hold the code in Photos

Open the picture in Photos, press and hold the code, and the phone offers what it found. Live Text has to be on first, under Settings, General, Language & Region, and it is not available in every region or language.

The capability arrived in iOS 16, not iOS 15; iOS 15 is when Live Text for ordinary text landed. Apple has never documented this route. Its instructions for scanning a QR code cover the camera and a Control Center control you add by hand, never a saved photo.

On Android, circle the code where it sits

Circle to Search is the route built for a code already on the screen. Press and hold the home button or the navigation handle, then circle the code. It reads codes inside an email, a PDF, a photo or a video.

It needs the Google app with Google set as the assistant. The rest of Android 17 is live camera, including the Pixel camera app, which will not scan in portrait or video mode. Manufacturer skins vary.

Visual intelligence is not the tool for this

In iOS 26 it works on whatever is on the screen, which sounds exactly right. It is not. Nothing it does touches QR codes or barcodes; it needs an iPhone 15 Pro or later; and it exists in sixteen languages, in beta.

The shortest route never saves the picture

Every route so far begins with the picture being somewhere: in your library, in a file you kept. Most codes do not arrive that way. They arrive inside something — an email, a chat, a booking confirmation, a page you have open — and saving a copy first is a step you take only because the tool asked for one.

So do not save it. Whatever app is holding the picture has a share button, and ScanKeeper sits in that list beside the messaging apps.

On iOS the naming happens without leaving the app

A panel comes up over whatever you were reading: the picture with the code lit and the rest of it dimmed, a field for the name, and Save. Then the panel goes and you are back in the email. ScanKeeper never opens, and that is not a flourish — iOS does not permit a share extension to open its own app, so everything it can finish, it finishes there.

If the shot holds several codes, each gets a turn, with a counter and a Skip for the ones you do not want. Closing it with the cross is a refusal rather than a delay: whatever you have not saved is dropped, and nothing is waiting for you the next time you open the app.

On Android the app opens and does the same work

Android has no equivalent panel, so ScanKeeper comes to the front and shows the same import screen you would have reached from Actions. The result is identical and the journey is one screen longer, which is worth knowing if you have used both phones and expected them to match.

A ticket can go across as a PDF

The attachment does not have to become a screenshot on the way. Send the file itself and its pages are drawn as pictures on the device, then read like any other image, which is the difference between a code at full size and a code frozen at whatever zoom the screen was at.

None of these routes touches the original. What arrives is copied, the copy is what gets read, and the copy is thrown away afterwards — nothing is written back into your library, your mail, or your files.

When an image will not read

About three pixels per module

A QR code is a grid of modules, the small squares it is built from. Decoding becomes dependable at about three pixels per module; two is the published floor, not a target.

So a code twenty-five modules wide wants roughly seventy-five pixels across, and an EAN-13, ninety-five units wide, wants at least a hundred and ninety.

The margin is part of the code

Cropping tight is the commonest way to break a code that was fine. A QR code needs a clear margin four modules wide on every side. EAN-13 wants eleven module-widths on the left and seven on the right, so trimming the left edge costs more.

Contrast, and the thirty percent myth

Pale gray on white fails the grading standards outright, and a photograph or gradient behind a code ruins the contrast module by module. Dark on light is reliable.

The thirty percent a QR code can supposedly lose is a ratio of codewords, not of area, and the three corner squares are not protected at all. A logo in the middle survives; a thumb over a corner does not.

One-dimensional codes have no correction whatever. A check digit notices an error but cannot repair one, so a glare band across the bars is fatal where a QR code would shrug.

When nothing reads at all

When the picture is past saving, the value under the code usually is not.

Use the camera, import an image, or enter the value manually. All three routes create the same editable card.

For a photo library full of them, there is a faster route: Bulk import

Not every code in a picture is worth keeping

Photo libraries collect these without being asked.

The ones worth a name

Anything you will be asked for again: a loyalty barcode from an email, a gym or library number, a locker code from a delivery notice, a coupon with a date on it.

The ones a picture cannot hold

A rotating ticket barcode refreshes every fifteen seconds, and a screenshot of it will not get you through the gate. If a code animates or counts down, the picture is worthless. How long a saved code stays good is a subject of its own: Barcode organizer

How to scan a QR code from a screenshot or a saved photo

1. 01

   Open the scanner and use the gallery option

   Tap the scanner button in your library, then the photo control at the top. There is nothing to aim at, and nothing stopping you choosing several pictures at once.

   

   Membership9 780201 379624

   

2. 02

   Check what came back

   ScanKeeper reads the picture on the device and shows the format it recognized beside the value it decoded.

   

   

3. 03

   Save it as a card

   Give it a name you would say out loud, then save. The card keeps the value and the format.

   

   

4. 04

   Open it again without the picture

   A saved card shows the code, its value with a copy button, the format, and how often you have opened it.

   

   

What a saved code does that a picture cannot