Business Card Scanning
Turning a stack of cards from an event into real contacts
Business card scanning solves a narrower problem than general document scanning: extract structured fields — name, company, title, email, phone, address — from a small printed card and get them into your contacts app without retyping. The hard part isn't taking the photo, it's the OCR accuracy on inconsistent fonts, layouts, and languages, and how cleanly the extracted fields map onto the right contact fields afterward.
This category matters most right after conferences and networking events, when someone comes home with 20-40 cards and the realistic alternative is manually typing each one into Contacts (which mostly doesn't happen — the cards sit in a drawer instead). CardSweep is built around that specific moment: point the camera at a card, let Vision OCR pull the fields, and save straight to iOS Contacts in one tap, entirely offline.
The app
How it compares to other tools
Frequently asked questions
How accurate is OCR on business cards compared to full documents?
Generally quite good for standard layouts (name, title, company block, contact details in clear print), because the text is short and high-contrast. Accuracy drops on heavily stylized cards, unusual fonts, or cards with a lot of decorative graphic elements competing with the text.
Why scan straight to Contacts instead of just keeping a photo of the card?
A photo isn't searchable or actionable — you can't tap to call, can't sync it, can't search 'who did I meet at that conference in March.' Extracting the fields into your actual contacts app makes the information usable the way you'd actually need it later.
Does a business-card scanner need to be online to work well?
No — on-device OCR (like Apple's Vision framework) handles standard card layouts without a network call. A cloud round-trip mainly helps with harder cases (unusual layouts, non-Latin scripts) at the cost of sending the card's contact information to a third-party server.