How to Scan a Barcode Image and Extract the Data in Python

Barcodes are a crucial part of many businesses, and having a system in place for interpreting them is make-or-break in a lot of cases. I don’t suggest the manual approach, as there are not only a myriad of different barcode formats, but it is also very difficult to program. Instead, I’m going to show you the shortcut you’ve been looking for all day, a shortcut that will allow you to implement barcode reading in but a few minutes.

Our method for today is going to use the Cloudmersive API client, so install that now with pip install.

pip install cloudmersive-barcode-api-client

Now we are simply going to input our image into the barcode_scan_image function from that API, which will look a bit like this:

from __future__ import print_function
import time
import cloudmersive_barcode_api_client
from cloudmersive_barcode_api_client.rest import ApiException
from pprint import pprint
# Configure API key authorization: Apikey
configuration = cloudmersive_barcode_api_client.Configuration()
configuration.api_key['Apikey'] = 'YOUR_API_KEY'
# Uncomment below to setup prefix (e.g. Bearer) for API key, if needed
# configuration.api_key_prefix['Apikey'] = 'Bearer'
# create an instance of the API class
api_instance = cloudmersive_barcode_api_client.BarcodeScanApi(cloudmersive_barcode_api_client.ApiClient(configuration))
image_file = '/path/to/file' # file | Image file to perform the operation on.  Common file formats such as PNG, JPEG are supported.
try:
# Scan an image for a barcode and turn the result.  Supported barcode types include AZTEC, CODABAR, CODE_39, CODE_93, CODE_128, DATA_MATRIX, EAN_8, EAN_13, ITF, MAXICODE, PDF_417, QR_CODE, RSS_14, RSS_EXPANDED, UPC_A, UPC_E, All_1D, UPC_EAN_EXTENSION, MSI, PLESSEY, IMB
api_response = api_instance.barcode_scan_image(image_file)
pprint(api_response)
except ApiException as e:
print("Exception when calling BarcodeScanApi->barcode_scan_image: %s\n" % e)

And with those two simple steps done, you are now ready to scan a bunch of different barcode types, such as EAN, UPC, and MSI.