Business Card Scanner

After the text is read, each line is examined. Email addresses, websites and phone numbers have recognisable patterns; labels such as M, Mobile or Cell mark a mobile number, and T, Tel or Office a work number. Lines with job words — Manager, Director, Engineer, Founder, Consultant and many more — become the title, a line with company words such as Ltd, Inc, GmbH, Solutions or Technologies becomes the company, and the name is the line that looks like two to four names. Lines with street words or numbers become the address.

Photograph the card straight on, filling most of the picture, in even light without glare — matte cards are easier than glossy ones. Very stylised fonts, light text on dark backgrounds, and text printed over pictures are hard for OCR. If a field is wrong, correct it, or edit the recognised text in the box and the fields are filled again. Cards in two languages can be read by choosing the main one.

The vCard file uses the widely supported vCard 3.0 format. On iPhone and Android, opening the .vcf file offers to add the contact; Outlook and Apple Contacts import it by double-clicking; Google Contacts imports it under Import. The QR code contains the same vCard, so pointing a phone camera at it adds the contact without transferring any file — handy when you scan on a computer but want the contact on your phone.

Save contacts from conferences, trade fairs and networking events, digitise an old card collection, add new clients or suppliers to a CRM by importing the vCards, or share a colleague's details with your team. For receipts use Receipt OCR, and for any other text in a picture use Image to Text.

Business cards contain personal data, so the photo is read on your device and nothing is uploaded. The reading engine and the language file are downloaded from this site once and then work from your browser's cache.