UPDATE
Thanks to reader Beloved for pointing out that this feature was added w/ iTunes 11. It is entirely possible I mentioned it before saying how cool it would be, but completely wiped it from my memory because it never appeared on my PC. Really not sure why it has taken so long for it to finally show up on my PC (I redeem iTunes cards pretty often). Perhaps iTunes is having issues seeing that I have a camera on my laptop? Who knows.

 

redeem-itunes-card-via-pc-cameraI’m not sure when this feature was added, but when I went to redeem a promo code in iTunes today, I was prompted with a new redemption option…my PC’s camera!

This could be very welcome news for those of you that hate to type in those longs strings of letters and numbers.

I tried clicking the “use camera” button but it didn’t work, so I closed out iTunes and launched it again, and the option was gone.

The only catch seems to be that this only works on codes where there is a box printed around the code. Although I believe this is the case with most of the newer iTunes cards you can pickup in stores, but not on the free app cards that Starbucks gives out.

Not sure how I got this to appear, but maybe we’ll see those get a face lift when this feature undoubtedly makes its way to iOS sometime in a future update.

Quick redemption of codes on the go would be a nice to have feature.

In case you were wondering, I’m running iTunes release 11.0.2.26 on my Windows 7 laptop (and the code in the image above is not valid).