# Turn a Business Card Photo Into a Contact

> Drop a photo of a business card or take one with your camera. OCR runs on your device and fills in the name, company, title, phone numbers, emails, and website. Fix anything it misread, then download a .vcf file every contacts app imports — or point your phone at the generated QR code and the contact lands straight in your address book.


Live tool: https://lofttools.com/tools/image-tools/business-card-to-vcard

Category: Image Tools

## How it works

1. **Add the card photo** — Drop a photo of the business card, pick one from your gallery, or take a shot with the camera. Flat, glare-free photos read best.
2. **Check the fields** — OCR fills in name, company, title, phones, emails, website, and address. Every field is editable before you export.
3. **Save the contact** — Download the .vcf file, copy the vCard text, or scan the QR code with your phone to import the contact directly.

## FAQ

### Which fields are detected?

Name, company, job title, phone numbers, email addresses, website, and street address. Emails, phones, and URLs are pattern matches and very reliable; name and company come from layout heuristics, so glance over them before saving.

### What is a .vcf file?

vCard — the universal contact format. iPhone, Android, Outlook, and Gmail all import it. One tap on the file adds the contact.

### How does the QR import work?

The QR code contains the whole vCard. Open your phone camera, point it at the code on screen, and the phone offers to add the contact — no file transfer needed.

### Does the card photo leave my device?

No. The OCR model runs in your browser, so the photo and the extracted contact stay on your machine.

## Tips

- **Photograph straight on** — Auto-crop straightens tilted cards, but glare from glossy stock is the main OCR killer — angle away from light sources.
- **QR is the fastest path to your phone** — Skip the file download — scan the on-screen QR with your phone camera and the contact imports in one tap.
- **Check the name field** — Emails and phones are exact pattern matches. Names rely on the card's layout, so stylized cards sometimes swap name and company.

## Privacy — what we do not do

This tool runs entirely in the browser via WebAssembly. Your file never reaches a Loft Tools server. Specifically:

- **No upload.** The file bytes load into the browser tab's memory and process on your own CPU. Open DevTools → Network and observe zero outbound requests carrying file data while Turn a Business Card Photo Into a Contact runs.
- **No AI training on your file.** Loft does not train models. We could not train on a file we cannot see.
- **No content scanning.** No virus, copyright, or content-moderation pass against your file. The bytes are not accessible to us.
- **No server-side log of file contents, filenames, or EXIF metadata.** Cloudflare edge captures URL and truncated IP for abuse defense (standard CDN behaviour). Cloudflare Web Analytics records anonymous page hits, no cookies, no PII. Nothing about your file content reaches any log.
- **No retention.** Close the tab and the file leaves browser memory. No backups exist on our side because no copy ever existed on our side.
- **No account.** No email, no signup, no auth, no telemetry tied to you.
- **Offline-capable after first visit** (PWA). Once you've loaded a tool, it caches; later sessions work without internet. For high-sensitivity files, run the tool once online to warm the cache, then disconnect before processing.

Compare with upload-based services: each transmits your file to a processing server. Even over HTTPS, each has logs, retention windows, and subpoena exposure. Loft has none of these because the server architecture does not include your file.

## More

- All tools: https://lofttools.com/tools
- Category: https://lofttools.com/tools/image-tools
- LLM index: https://lofttools.com/llms.txt