Business Card Scanner — Scan a Business Card to vCard Contacts

OCR reads every line of text from the card photo, then heuristics extract: the name (first multi-word line that isn't an email/phone/URL), title and company (next non-contact lines), emails (regex pattern), phone numbers (digit-pattern with 7+ digits), and URLs. The fields are wrapped in standards-compliant vCard 3.0 — ready to import into Contacts, Outlook or your CRM.

Every major contacts app supports vCard 3.0 import: iOS Contacts (open the .vcf in Mail, tap Add to Contacts), Android Contacts (via Files), Outlook (drag the file into a contact folder), Google Contacts (Import in the web UI), Salesforce, HubSpot and Pipedrive.

All of them are captured. The vCard includes each email as a separate EMAIL line and each phone as a separate TEL line. Most contacts apps display them all and let you label each (work, mobile, etc.) after import.

Photograph the card straight-on against a contrasting background, in good light. Avoid shadow across the card. Glossy laminated cards reflect light — angle them slightly or use diffused light. For metal/foil-printed cards, OCR works better in cooler color temperature.

Yes — pick the card's language in the Card language list in the Engine tab; it covers French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi and many more. Multilingual cards (e.g. CJK name on one side, English contact info on the other) work if you photograph each side separately.

On most cards "Title" appears before "Company" but some designs reverse the order. If the assignment is wrong, correct the Title and Company fields on the result before you copy or download the vCard.

The photo is uploaded to our OCR service, retained temporarily for processing and result delivery, then removed under our Security policy — unless you explicitly share a result, which keeps it at a public link anyone who has it can open without automatic expiration while Pixoate provides the sharing service. We do not use card images for training. For competitive-intelligence scanning at events, consider a desktop OCR install.

Preview the contacts and download the unbranded .vcf output without signup. Free use is subject to fair use; Premium supports larger batches and larger uploads.

Yes. The scanner reads the card and outputs a standards-compliant vCard 3.0 (.vcf) — name, title, company, emails, phones and website. Open the .vcf on your phone (e.g. via Mail) and tap Add to Contacts, or import it into Outlook, Google Contacts or your CRM.

Use the Card language dropdown in the Engine tab to pick the language printed on the card — for example French, Japanese or Arabic — before you choose Scan card. Matching the language improves how accurately the OCR engine reads accented characters and non-Latin scripts into the name, title and company fields.

No, you do not need to upload the photo again. Changing the Card language clears the current result, so choose Scan card again to read the same photo with the new language.

Pick the language that matches the majority of the text on the card, since that's what the OCR engine tunes its character recognition for. If a card has, say, English on one side and Chinese or Japanese on the other, photograph and scan each side separately with its matching Card language selection rather than trying to capture both in one shot — you'll get two clean, accurate contact extractions instead of one garbled one.

Yes — Pixoate supports batch and bulk processing. Switch to Batch mode, add up to 60 business cards on Premium or 200 on Pro, set your options once, and every business card is processed with the same settings before you download a ZIP with one .vcf contact file per card. Bulk processing is a Premium feature; the output uses the same quality and settings as single mode.

Yes — with bulk processing you configure the settings a single time and they apply to every item in the batch — up to 60 business cards on Premium or 200 on Pro. There is no need to repeat the setup per item, and Temporary uploaded and generated files are processed securely and deleted automatically.

Almost always one of three things. The file is over the 20 MB free upload limit — Premium takes 50 MB and Pro 120 MB. The format is not one this tool accepts, so check the list shown on the upload panel. Or the file is not really the format its name says: renaming a file does not change what is inside it, and that is the reason a valid-looking scan or photo gets refused.

Accuracy tracks the source image more than any setting. Shoot or scan straight on rather than at an angle, get even light with no shadow falling across the page, and fill the frame with the document. Set the language before you run it — OCR guessing the wrong alphabet is the usual cause of output that looks like nonsense. Always read the result before you rely on it.

Business Card Scanner supports free standard use within the published processing allowances. Free downloads are clean — no watermark. No signup is required for standard tool use. Photo effects and AI edits have a web-size limit on Free, with the original-resolution result available through Premium or one credit. Crop, resize, rotate, compress and convert stay full size. Premium supports batches of up to 60 files, with the applicable plan limits shown before processing.

No — Business Card Scanner runs in the browser on desktop and phone. There is nothing to install, no trial to start, and no license to buy before you can see whether it does what you need. Try it on the file you are actually stuck with rather than a sample.

Yes. After the scan, Name, Title, Company, Email, Phone and Web are editable fields, and Copy vCard and Download .vcf use whatever is in them at that moment. You do not need to scan again or open the file in a text editor. Put one email address, phone number or website on each line.

This scanner saves contacts as .vcf files, not as a spreadsheet. For one spreadsheet row per card, use Extract Data to JSON in batch mode, a Premium feature, with its Business card template. The template lists Name, Title, Company, Email, Phone and Website, and the batch result is an Excel file with one row per image. That tool finds each field by its printed label, and cards rarely print labels such as Name or Title, so expect to fill in the cells it leaves empty.

The .vcf contains text fields only: name, title, company, email addresses, phone numbers and websites. The card image is not embedded and no portrait is added. If you want a picture on the contact, add it in your contacts app after you import the file.

This tool works the other way, from a card photo to a .vcf. To design a card, type the details into Business Card Maker, which lays out a printable PDF. It does not import a .vcf file, so you copy the name, title and numbers across yourself.

It takes the last word of the Name field as the family name and everything before it as the given names, while the full name stays as the display name. A surname with several words, such as de la Cruz, is therefore split at the wrong place. Adjust it in your contacts app after import.

The scanner does not tell an office line from a mobile one, so every number in the .vcf is saved with the mobile type. Most contacts apps let you change the label after import, so mark work, fax or direct lines there. The digits themselves are whatever the scan read from the card, so check them too.