Add Vaccine Cards and More to Wallet with ‘Live Text’
You’ve been able to scan QR codes with your iPhone camera for a few years now, and this year Apple has enhanced that to add support for COVID-19 vaccines cards and other SMART Health cards in the Health and Wallet apps.
With iOS 15.0, you could add your SMART-compatible vaccination card to the Health app, while iOS 15.1 expands that to let you place a more easily accessible version of the card right alongside your payment and loyalty cards in Apple Wallet.
Adding a vaccination card normally requires scanning the QR code with the iPhone camera, which of course means you need to either print it out or have it displayed on your Mac or iPad screen, so you can point your camera at it, but it turns out that there’s one easier way, thanks to iOS 15’s new Live Text feature.
As first shared by iPhone in Canada reader Andrew Escobar, the new Live Text feature doesn’t just recognize text — it can also be used to scan QR codes from images, such as those saved to the Photos library.
This means that you can take a screenshot of a QR code and then “scan” that with Live Text to act on it. To do this with a vaccination card:
- Obtain the vaccination QR code from your appropriate government health agency and view it on your iPhone.
- Zoom in on the web page or PDF containing the QR code so that it takes up most of your iPhone screen.
- Take a screenshot by simultaneously pressing the volume up and sleep/wake button.
- Open the Photos app and locate the screenshot of the saved QR code.
- Tap the ‘Live Text’ button in the bottom-right corner. The icon will turn blue and any text and QR codes in the photo will be highlighted.
- Tap and hold on the QR code.
- Tap Open in Health from the pop-up menu that appears.
- Proceed to add your vaccine card to your Wallet and Health app in the normal way.
This doesn’t just work for vaccine cards, either. You can use Live Text to scan any QR code that happens to be in your photo library, or even those found in photos in third-party apps like Facebook and Instagram, allowing you to read other information from them and even visit the web links that they reference.