How to Scan a QR Code on a Computer: Windows, Mac, Chromebook and Linux

Which Route Works on Each Computer

The right route depends on two things: the operating system, and where the QR code is - on paper in front of you, on the screen you are looking at, or in a saved file. Windows and ChromeOS can read a printed code through the built-in camera app; every system can read a code on the screen or in a file through a browser decoder.

Three decision rules cover almost every case. If the code is printed and the computer runs Windows or ChromeOS, use the Camera app. If the code is printed and the computer is a Mac or a Linux machine without a QR-aware camera app, use a phone, or photograph the code and decode the photo. If the code is already on the screen or in a file, take a screenshot and decode the screenshot - the webcam is the wrong tool for anything the computer is already displaying.

How Do I Scan a QR Code on Windows 10 or 11?

Open the Camera app, make sure the Barcode button on the right-hand side is selected, and hold the QR code in front of the webcam until it is in focus. The Camera app scans automatically and shows the link at the bottom of the window; select it to open the website. Microsoft documents this route for both Windows 10 and Windows 11.

1. Open the Camera App. Search for Camera in the Start menu. If another app is using the webcam, such as a video call, close it first.
2. Select the Barcode Button. The mode buttons sit on the right-hand side of the window. On older Camera builds without a Barcode button, the option has typically been behind Try out new experimental features in the app's settings.
3. Hold the Code About 20 to 30 cm Away. Fill roughly a third of the preview with the code and hold it still. Too close and a fixed-focus webcam blurs it; too far and the modules get too few pixels.
4. Read the Link Before Selecting It. The decoded link appears at the bottom of the Camera app. Check the domain, then select it to open the site in your default browser.

For a QR code that is already on the screen - in an email, a PDF, a web page or a chat - use Snipping Tool instead of the camera. Press Windows + Shift + S, select the area around the code, open the capture in Snipping Tool, and choose Text actions. Microsoft announced QR code detection in Text actions for Snipping Tool in May 2024, and on current Windows 11 builds the link typically appears as a button to open. Windows 10's Snipping Tool has no Text actions.

If neither route is available - a managed work PC without the Camera app, Windows 10, or a Text actions panel that finds only words - paste the screenshot into the QR code scanner with Ctrl + V. The scanner runs jsQR in the browser tab, shows the full decoded text with its type labelled, and works the same in Edge, Chrome and Firefox.

How Do I Scan a QR Code on a Mac?

A Mac has no built-in QR code scanner: macOS ships no Camera app with a code mode, and Apple's Live Text pages for Preview and Photos describe text, phone numbers and web addresses but not QR codes. For a printed code, scan it with an iPhone; for a code on the screen or in a file, use a browser decoder.

The routes, from fastest to most self-contained:

• A printed code: scan it with your iPhone. Point the iPhone Camera at it and tap the banner. To get the link onto the Mac, copy it on the iPhone and paste it on the Mac; Universal Clipboard moves it across when both devices are signed in to the same Apple Account with Handoff on. How to scan a QR code on an iPhone covers the camera side.
• A code on the screen: screenshot to the clipboard, then paste. Press Command + Control + Shift + 4, drag around the code, then open the QR code scanner and press Command + V. The image goes straight from the clipboard into the decoder without being saved as a file.
• A printed code with no iPhone: photograph it with Photo Booth. Take a picture with the Mac's camera, drag the photo out of Photo Booth onto the desktop, and drop it into a browser decoder. A mirrored photo is not a problem; in our test the open decoder read a left-to-right flipped code at every position.
• A code on a web page in Chrome: right-click it. Choose Search with Google Lens; the side panel typically shows the link the code holds. Google's help page says a screenshot of the page is sent to Google to do this.

Live Text may still help. Several third-party write-ups report that recent macOS versions offer an open-link option when you Control-click a QR code in Preview or Safari, but Apple's own pages for Live Text do not mention QR codes, so treat that as something to try rather than a route to rely on. If a Control-click on the code offers nothing, use the screenshot route.

Continuity Camera does not change this. Continuity Camera lets an iPhone XR or later act as the Mac's webcam on macOS Ventura 13 and iOS 16 or later, according to Apple's support page, but it only supplies video to apps; it does not decode anything. If the iPhone is already in your hand, its own Camera app is the scanner.

How Do I Scan a QR Code on a Chromebook?

Open the Camera app, select Scan at the bottom, then QR code, and hold the code in the viewfinder. Google's Chromebook help page says the recognised URL, text or Wi-Fi connection prompt then appears, and that the camera also reads a QR code from the normal viewfinder without switching modes. Select the result to open it.

For a code that is already on the Chromebook's screen, ChromeOS has a screen route through Google Lens. Open Screen capture, choose Take partial screenshot, drag around the code, then select Search with Google; or select the Launcher, then Lens, and select the region. Google's help page for Lens on a Chromebook requires Google as the default search engine and does not mention QR codes, so the result is typically the link but may be a page of image matches instead.

The private route works on a Chromebook too. Press Ctrl + Shift + Show windows, drag around the code, and paste the capture into the QR code scanner with Ctrl + V; the decode runs in Chrome on the device. A Wi-Fi code read this way shows the network name and password as text, which the Camera app would have offered to join instead - the Wi-Fi QR code page explains the format.

How Do I Scan a QR Code on Linux?

Linux has no single answer, because the camera app depends on the desktop. On GNOME 48 or later, the default Snapshot camera app typically detects a QR code in the viewfinder; on older GNOME releases, KDE and most other desktops, the camera app does not. For anything on the screen or in a file, every Linux desktop has the same route: a screenshot pasted into a browser decoder.

Dedicated apps fill the gap where the camera app does not. GNOME's Decoder, listed on apps.gnome.org, scans with the camera or from a screenshot, and KDE's Qrca scans with the camera. For scripts and batches, zbar's zbarimg reads a QR code from an image file on the command line and is in most distributions' repositories. For one code on the screen, a screenshot pasted into a browser tab is faster than installing any of them.

How to Read a QR Code That Is on Your Own Screen

Take a screenshot and decode the screenshot. A computer cannot point its webcam at its own display, and holding a phone showing the code up to the webcam adds glare, moire and blur that a screenshot never has. This is the case the KoloQR scanner exists for, and the four steps below take under a minute.

KoloQR, a free QR code generator with circular and custom-shaped QR codes, also publishes a QR code scanner that reads a PNG, JPG, WebP or GIF by drop, file picker or paste. It does not use the webcam at all - it reads images, so it never asks for camera permission - and it decodes in the browser tab, so the image is not uploaded.

1. Zoom Until the Code Is Large. Enlarge the email, PDF or page until the QR code is at least a few centimetres across on screen. A code captured from a page-fit view is often too few pixels wide to decode.
2. Capture the Code to the Clipboard. Windows: Windows + Shift + S. Mac: Command + Control + Shift + 4. Chromebook: Ctrl + Shift + Show windows. Drag around the code and include the light margin on every side.
3. Paste It Into the Scanner. Open the QR code scanner in any browser and press Ctrl + V or Command + V. If the capture went to a file rather than the clipboard, drop the file onto the panel instead.
4. Read the Decoded Text First. The full payload appears as text with its type labelled - link, Wi-Fi, contact, authenticator key. Read the domain before opening a link.

If the screenshot will not decode, the cause is almost always the crop or the size, and how to scan a QR code from an image has the pixel count a screenshot needs and the seven reasons an image fails. For the structure of the symbol rather than its content - version, error correction level, mask - the QR code decoder reads the same file.

Why Won't My Laptop Webcam Scan a QR Code?

A laptop webcam usually fails on a QR code for one of three reasons: the code is too close for a fixed-focus lens, a glare spot covers one of the corner squares, or the code is too far away to get enough pixels per module. A mirrored preview is not one of them. Most webcams are built for a face at arm's length, not a 3 cm code at 15 cm.

A fixed-focus webcam is a camera whose lens is set at one focus distance, so anything held closer than that distance comes out soft. Phones refocus on the code in a fraction of a second; many laptop webcams cannot, which is why the natural instinct of bringing the code closer makes things worse. We measured how sharply that matters with the site's own rig, scripts/webcam-decode-rig.mjs, run on 2 October 2026 with jsQR, the open decoder this site's scanner uses.

Two conclusions follow. Focus fails as a cliff, not a slope: within a few hundredths of a module of extra blur, the decoder went from reading every time to never, so a code that is slightly too close does not read slowly - it does not read at all. And where glare lands matters far more than how big it is. A finder pattern is one of the three concentric squares in a QR code's corners that a scanner uses to locate the symbol and work out its rotation, and a reflection two modules wide over one of them hid the whole code, while a spot covering 40% of the width over the data was absorbed by error correction. Codes made at a lower error correction level than H have less room for that.

Distance is the third limit, and it is arithmetic rather than a measurement. Assume a 1280-pixel-wide webcam frame and a horizontal field of view of about 70°, which makes the visible width about 1.4 times the distance. A 5 cm code of 33 modules then gets about 4.6 captured pixels per module at 30 cm and about 2.8 at 50 cm; the same code at 3 cm wide gets about 2.8 at 30 cm. Below about 3 pixels per module, reads become unreliable even when the image is sharp, so a small code wants the near end of the range and a fixed-focus lens wants the far end.

How to Get a Webcam to Read a QR Code

Hold the code 20 to 30 cm from the webcam, tilt it slightly so no reflection sits on a corner square, and keep it still for a second. If the preview of the code looks soft, move it back, not closer. Those three changes fix most webcam failures without any software.

• Move back until the edges look crisp. If the boundary between dark and light modules is fuzzy in the preview, the code is inside the lens's focus distance. More distance gives fewer pixels but a sharper image, and sharpness is the limit that fails abruptly.
• Tilt a phone screen to move the glare. A phone held flat to a webcam reflects the room's lights back into the lens. A small tilt slides the reflection off the code; watch the three corner squares in particular.
• Turn the phone's brightness up. A dim phone screen photographed by a webcam loses contrast quickly. Full brightness gives the decoder the clearest dark-to-light difference.
• Light a printed code from the front, not from behind the screen. A laptop screen is the brightest thing in a dark room, and a paper code held in front of it is backlit and murky. A desk lamp on the paper fixes it.
• Wipe the lens. A fingerprint on a laptop webcam spreads light across the whole frame, which lowers contrast everywhere at once.
• Hold the code square to the camera. A modest angle is corrected by the decoder; a steep one is not, which distorted QR codes measures.

When none of that works, change the route rather than fighting the camera. Photograph the code with a phone, or with the laptop's camera app, and decode the photo; a still image can be cropped and zoomed, and a decoder gets as many tries at it as it needs. If a printed code fails on every device, the fault is probably in the code itself, and why a QR code is not scanning works through the causes in order.

Is It Safe to Use an Online QR Code Scanner?

It is safe when the scanner decodes the image on your own computer and nothing is uploaded; it is a privacy risk when the image is sent to a server. Local decoding is reading a QR code on your own device, so the image is never sent to a server. The page itself rarely says which kind it is, so it is worth checking.

The difference matters most for the codes people most often need to read on a computer. A two-factor authentication setup code contains the secret key behind every one-time password for that account, as an otpauth:// address in plain text. A Wi-Fi code contains the network password. A boarding pass or a ticket contains a booking reference. Any of those, uploaded to an unknown server, is a copy of the credential you did not mean to make.

Three ways to tell what a scanner does with your image:

• Load the page, then disconnect. Turn off Wi-Fi after the scanner has loaded, then decode an image. A scanner that decodes locally still works; one that uploads fails.
• Read the help page of the tool you are using. Google's help page for Lens in Chrome says that a screenshot of the page and page data are sent to Google. That is a stated, temporary use, but it is not local decoding.
• Prefer the operating system's own tools. The Windows Camera app and ChromeOS Camera read through the camera on the device, and a browser scanner that runs in the tab - the KoloQR scanner runs jsQR in the page and works offline once loaded - keeps the image where it is.

Reading a code safely is not the same as trusting it. A QR code carries no signature and no proof of who made it, so read the decoded domain before opening a link; the how to scan a QR code guide covers what to check, including login codes that sign someone else into your account.

Why Web Scanners Behave Differently on Windows and Mac

Some browser-based scanners rely on the browser's built-in Barcode Detection API, and Chrome supports it only on macOS and ChromeOS, not on Windows or Linux. A scanner built that way works on a MacBook or a Chromebook and silently does nothing on a Windows laptop in the same browser. Scanners that bring their own decoder, such as jsQR, work everywhere.

If a web scanner works on one of your computers and not on another, this is the usual reason, not your webcam or your image. The fix from the reader's side is to use a scanner that decodes with its own library; the KoloQR scanner does not use the Barcode Detection API, so it behaves the same in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari on every operating system.

Most QR Codes on a Computer Are Meant for Your Phone

A QR code shown on a computer screen is usually there for a phone to scan, not for the computer to read. WhatsApp Web, Telegram Desktop and many sign-in pages show a code so that a phone that is already signed in can approve the computer; authenticator setup pages show one so the phone's app can store the secret. In those cases, scan the screen with the phone.

Point the phone's camera at the screen, with the display brightness up and the code filling about a third of the phone's frame. If the code is for an authenticator app, scan it from inside that app rather than the camera, because the camera does not know what to do with an otpauth:// address. Most setup pages also offer a typed key under a link such as can't scan the code, which avoids the camera entirely.

The one case where the computer should read its own code is an authenticator you run on the computer itself, such as a password manager with one-time codes. Those apps typically read the setup code from the screen or let you paste the key; where they do not, decode the screenshot locally and copy the secret from the decoded text, never through a scanner that uploads it.

When the Code You Are Scanning Is Your Own

Scanning on a computer is also the fastest way to check a QR code you made before it goes to print. Drop the exported file into the scanner: if it decodes on the computer and the printed copy does not scan on a phone, the fault entered after the file - in the layout, the export or the press.

The QR code validator takes the same file and measures why a code might struggle: contrast, quiet zone, module size and error correction. To make a new code, the KoloQR generator builds it in the browser and exports PNG, SVG, PDF and EPS. KoloQR makes static codes only, so a code that needs scan analytics or a destination you can change after printing needs a dynamic QR service instead.