Barcodes the camera can actually read

August 26, 2026

The camera now reads a printed barcode the way it has always read a QR code.

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• New A Light button while the camera is scanning, on phones whose lamp your browser will let the app switch on.

  A Light button next to Stop while the camera is scanning, on phones whose camera lamp your browser will let the app switch on. It is worth reaching for on a dim shelf or a shiny label, and for more than seeing: extra light lets the camera take a faster picture, and a faster picture is a sharper barcode. The button appears only where it will work — an iPhone offers its lamp to no website at all — and the compatibility page says which phones those are.

• Improved The camera now asks for a far sharper picture, so a printed barcode reads as reliably as a QR code.

  Scanning a printed barcode with the camera used to be a matter of luck, while a QR code read first time. The two are not the same problem: a QR code carries enough spare information to survive a soft or shaky picture, and the thin bars of a barcode carry none, so the camera has to see them properly or not at all. It now asks the camera for a far sharper picture, keeps it focused while you scan, and shows you the whole of what it is looking at instead of a square crop of it, with an outline marking where a barcode reads best. A QR code still reads from anywhere in view, exactly as before.

• Fixed A barcode you draw on your own label now prints with the white margin and the whole dots a scanner needs.

  A barcode you draw on a label of your own now prints so that a scanner will take it. Two things were wrong with it, and both looked entirely correct on paper. It was drawn right to the edges of its box, leaving none of the white margin either side that a scanner needs to find where the bars begin — so a barcode with anything next to it, or one sitting at the edge of the label, could read as nothing at all. And its bars were drawn at whatever fraction of a printer dot the box worked out to, which rounds one stripe into a mix of two widths and is the classic reason a label scans on one printer and not another. The bars are now a whole number of dots wide, the white margin comes out of the box, and the editor counts that margin when it warns you a barcode is too narrow — so the width it asks for is the width it actually needs.