Scan a WiFi QR Code with Your Camera or an Image

The situation this tool solves

You scanned a WiFi QR code, from a router sticker, a cafe table tent, a hotel welcome card, and instead of connecting, your phone showed a wall of text. Or it connected your phone, but now you need the actual password to get your laptop online. Either way, the credentials are locked inside the code, and this decoder gets them out.

Two ways to decode

Upload the image. A photo of the sticker, a screenshot someone sent you, a saved QR image: drop it in and the decoder reads the code and displays the network name, security type, and password separately.

Paste the raw text. If a scanner app already showed you something like WIFI:T:WPA;S:HomeNetwork;P:s3cret!;;, paste it into our text-paste decoder and it splits the fields cleanly, handling escaped characters that trip up manual reading.

How camera scanning works

Why your camera shows text instead of connecting

This is the single most common complaint about WiFi QR codes, and it is not a fault in the code. Android has supported automatic WiFi joining from a QR code since version 10. iOS supports it through the Camera app on iOS 11 and later. Outside those paths (a third-party scanner app, a desktop webcam, a browser-based reader) the software has no permission to change your network settings, so it does the only thing it can and shows you the text.

What you see looks like this:

WIFI:T:WPA;S:MyNetwork;P:hunter2;H:false;;

That is the correct, complete content of the code. Nothing is broken. You simply need the fields pulled apart, which is what the scanner above does automatically.

Where the password lives inside the code

A WiFi QR code is not encrypted. It is a plain text string in a standard format that Android and iOS both read. The S: field is the network name, P: is the password, T: is the security type. Our WiFi QR format guide documents every field, including the odd cases: hidden networks, WEP legacy codes, and passwords containing semicolons.

Common situations

Hotel gave you a QR but the smart TV needs a typed password. The office guest network is QR-only and your Linux laptop has no scanner. Grandma's router sticker faded except the QR square. A friend AirDropped you a screenshot of their network code. In each case: decode once, read the password, type it where you need it. If your only copy of the code is on the same phone screen you are scanning with, use the screenshot WiFi scanner instead: it reads codes from images already on your device.

A note on ethics and safety

Decoding a code that was shared with you is exactly what the code is for: the owner published their credentials the moment they printed it. This tool does not crack, guess, or intercept anything; it reads what is openly written. Everything runs in your browser, so the password never touches our servers. Scanning a code from an untrusted source? Check where it points first with the safe QR scanner: WiFi-format codes are harmless, but URL codes disguised as WiFi codes are a known phishing trick. And when you want to make a code for your own network, the WiFi QR generator does it in seconds.

QR code format versions and capacity limits

WiFi QR codes use the WIFI: URI scheme, standardized by the ZXing project and later adopted by Android 10+ and iOS 11+. The full string follows the pattern WIFI:T:WPA;S:networkname;P:password;H:false;;. The T field declares authentication type: WPA, WPA2, WEP, or nopass. WEP is deprecated under IEEE 802.11i and flagged insecure since 2004, but QR codes encoding WEP credentials still circulate in older hospitality and retail installations. QR code version 10 stores up to 174 bytes in binary mode - enough for a 32-character SSID plus a 63-character WPA2 passphrase with room for the URI wrapper. Passwords exceeding 63 characters are truncated silently by most generator tools, producing a code that scans but fails authentication.

What this decoder does not verify

The decoder extracts the credential string. It does not test whether those credentials authenticate against a live router, confirm the network is in range, or verify the BSSID. It performs no network request. If a QR code encodes a hidden network (H:true), most OS-level scanners fail silently; this tool still returns the SSID and password regardless of the hidden flag. The tool also does not detect credential reuse - if the same password appears in known breach databases, that check requires a separate service such as the HIBP API, which has indexed over 13 billion compromised passwords as of 2025.

Troubleshooting failed decodes

Decode failures trace to four causes in order of frequency: image compression artifacts (JPEG at quality below 85 destroys finder-pattern edges), incorrect QR version detection, non-standard URI encoding where special characters in the password are not percent-encoded, and damaged quiet zones (the blank border must be at least 4 module widths per ISO/IEC 18004:2015). If the decoder returns partial output - SSID present but password blank - the password field contains an unescaped semicolon. The WIFI URI spec requires semicolons inside field values to be escaped as \;. Re-encode using a generator that follows the spec, such as the WiFi QR code generator, then re-scan the corrected code.