How to scan a business card on iPhone

Most "how to scan a business card" guides are really product placement. So here is the version that does not need us: three ways to do it with what is already on your phone, what each one is good for, and the specific point at which they stop working.

Method 1 — Live Text, straight from the Camera

1. Open the Camera and frame the card

   Fill the frame, keep the card flat, and avoid shooting straight down into your own shadow. You do not need to take the photo.

2. Tap the Live Text button

   The small square-with-lines icon that appears in the corner once iOS detects text. The recognised text becomes selectable in place.

3. Tap and hold a phone number or email

   iOS offers Call, Send Message, or Add to Contacts directly from the viewfinder.

4. Or select all the text and copy it

   Then paste it into Contacts, Notes, or wherever the record needs to live.

Good for: one card, right now, when you only need the phone number. Recognition is on-device and works in airplane mode. It handles Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Latin scripts.

Where it stops: it gives you *text*, not *fields*. Nothing decides which line is the job title and which is the department, nothing keeps the card image with the record, and there is no concept of a back side.

Method 2 — Notes document scanner

1. Open Notes and create a note

   Tap the attachment button, then Scan Documents.

2. Hold the card in frame until it auto-captures

   Notes detects the edges, deskews the card and crops it. Shoot the back as a second page.

3. Save, then long-press the scan to copy its text

   You get a clean, cropped, perspective-corrected image plus selectable text, both stored in the note.

Good for: keeping the image as evidence, and for cards with two sides you want side by side. Free, offline, already installed.

Where it stops: Notes is not searchable the way an address book is. You cannot filter by company, tag by event, or export a hundred cards to CSV. At about thirty cards this becomes a folder you never open again.

Method 3 — the Contacts app, by hand

Copy from Live Text, paste field by field. Perfectly correct, permanently yours, and completely unrealistic past a handful of cards. Worth knowing as the fallback that always works: a dedicated app should never be the *only* way to get a card into your phone.

Where the built-in tools genuinely run out

• They produce text, not typed fields — no name, title, department, company, work vs mobile vs fax distinction.
• No concept of a card having two faces, so bilingual cards become two unrelated notes.
• No duplicate detection when you meet the same person at two trade shows.
• No tagging by event, and no search across notes and raw text together.
• No bulk export to CSV, Excel or vCard.
• Nothing flags a field it is unsure about, so misreads enter your address book silently.

If you scan a card a month, stop here — Live Text is genuinely enough and we would rather say so than sell you something. If you come home from a trade show with two hundred cards, the missing pieces are the whole job, and that is what Kardhaus is for.

Common questions