API Spotlight: Cloudmersive Barcode APIs

Thousands of global businesses - especially those involved in the retail, healthcare, and transportation sectors - need the help of consistent, reliable barcode services to operate at peak efficiency. All told, that means having the capacity to lookup, scan, and generate barcodes on command - and thankfully, there are Cloudmersive APIs available for all those needs. With access to our Barcode API endpoint, you can quickly generate a variety of the most common barcode types (including QR, UPC & EAN) as PNG files and scan/recognize images of many diverse barcode types with ease. In addition to those options, you can search & return information specifically for EAN barcode values (using the numerical barcode value only).

Below, we’ll take a closer look at our barcode scanning and barcode generation services.

Barcode Generation

Our Barcode Generation APIs represent three of the most common barcode types used across the globe: QR, UPC, and EAN. While QR codes have gained widespread contemporary popularity largely in thanks to the proliferation of smartphones, the latter two options are older GS1 standards with decades of history in international commerce. UPC and EAN barcodes are very similar in practice, and the primary difference between them comes down to regional/geographical preference; UPC barcodes are used most commonly in the USA and Canada, while EAN barcodes are more widely seen throughout the rest of the world.

Generating QR barcodes with our QR API is as simple as inputting any text string of your choosing; the API will return a 2D PNG file containing a unique QR barcode which can be scanned by any handheld photographic device. QR codes offer a fantastic way to make a variety of content - such as websites, menus, or notes of any kind - available for anyone with a smartphone camera.

If it’s EAN or UPC barcodes you’re looking for, there’s a crucial distinction to be made within each category: does your product require EAN-13 or EAN-8; UPC-A or UPC-E? While EAN-13 and UPC-A barcodes are the “standard” barcode length for each category, the reality is that not all retail products are physically big enough to present these 13- & 12-digit barcode values (or the larger line patterns that represent them). For smaller products with less real estate to offer, EAN-8 and UPC-E offer a compact solution, containing only 8 and 6 digits respectively - and significantly compressed line patterns. All four of these common barcode types are readily available to you via their own individual Barcode API iterations, requiring nothing more than numerical barcode values to generate linear codes for your business at scale.

Barcode Scanning

If a huge number of businesses require the capacity to generate barcodes, exponentially more require the ability to scan them. Accepting inputs in common image formats (i.e., PNG, JPG, etc.), our Scan Barcode Image API will return clearly labeled strings identifying both the general barcode type and the specific barcode number represented within the input barcode image. A variety of barcode types are supported for this operation, including some of the most common (UPC, EAN, QR, etc.) and relatively less common (AZTEC, CODABAR, MSI, etc.) types out there.

As a final note - for any EAN product values obtained through this Barcode Scanning operation, you can employ our EAN Lookup API to instantly return detailed product data.