Decode and inspect a QR code

What a result means

A decoded result means our decoder read the code, and the text shown is exactly what it carries - the same verifier Ironfang Render runs against every QR it generates. It does not mean the destination is safe: a readable link can still lead somewhere you should not go, so check the address before you open it yourself. Nor does it guarantee that every phone, scanner or printed copy will read the code; contrast, the quiet zone around it and its printed size still matter.

Photos, uploads and unreadable codes

Upload a PNG, JPEG or WebP up to 8 MiB, or use Take a photo: on a phone it opens the camera, takes one picture and decodes it. It is not a live scanner, so hold the phone steady and fill most of the frame with the code. The decoder retries a photo at smaller sizes, with the contrast stretched and with light and dark swapped, and looks for a code among other things in the picture. Codes it still cannot read are usually blurred, cropped at an edge, too small in the frame, printed with too little contrast, or damaged beyond their error correction. If an image contains several codes, only one is reported.

Why we never open the link

A QR payload is untrusted input. We never request URLs contained in uploaded codes: the decoded text is shown exactly as it is, and URLs are labelled but never fetched or made clickable.

Need to generate styled QR codes automatically? Ironfang Render verifies every QR it creates before delivery.