Infrared technologies provide tremendous value to our modern-day society, in the fields of remote sensing, imaging, metrology, product inspection, environmental monitoring, and biomedical diagnostics. The demand for the third-generation infrared photodetectors, to enable easy-to-fabricate, low-cost, and tunable infrared active optoelectronic materials, has driven the development of infrared colloidal quantum dots (CQDs). This review introduces the preparation methods of infrared CQDs and development of infrared CQD detectors, and lists the representative research results of CQDs in the field of optoelectronics. Finally, the infrared quantum dot photodetectors are summarized, and several research problems are proposed. The results of this study guide the commercialization of the infrared quantum dot detector.