QR code reader

[JoeCohen]

Can we install and integrate OS software that reads QR codes from a desktop camera or from images?

• Would let a foray Recorder scan a physical Field Slip on a desktop.
• For MO users (and maybe Recorders) could eliminate the scanning step:
  • User includes the Field Slip in the photo(s) for an Observation. (Photo could be mushroom + Field Slip, or a stand-along Field Slip photo).
  • create_observation scans its Images for a Field Slip. If it finds one, creates the Field Slip and associates it with the Observation.
  • At forays, participants could send the Recorder photos of the field slips. Recorder could create Observations from those photos. Maybe some kind of bulk create feature? (Recorder drags a bunch of Images to a page, MO then creates Observations and field slips.)

[mo-nathan]

I've looked into this a bit and it appears the most widely used QR reader code is the zxing Java library supported by Google (https://github.com/zxing/zxing). There are a number of JavaScript wrappers for it, a JavaScript port called ZXing-JS (https://github.com/zxing-js/library) and various tutorials. There have been some attempts at native Ruby readers, but none of them seem to be maintained. I found one paywalled video tutorial specifically about doing it from Ruby on Rails at https://www.driftingruby.com/episodes/creating-and-reading-qr-codes. There's also a somewhat out of date (2020) text one here:https://dev.to/morinoko/qr-code-reader-on-rails-5816. I believe all of these work on video or image input managed by the browser. I haven't found anything that I'm sure works on images stored on the server. I don't think this is show stopper as long as we have a way to have MO know that it should be looking for a live QR code or that the next image upload is expected to have a code.

In the meantime, the workaround for this to use one of many free online QR readers. I haven't settled on a favorite yet for this workaround.