Any camera reads this and offers to save you. No app.
It reads the card on your phone
Name, job, company, email, every number, the website and the postal address. The reading happens in your browser — the photograph of somebody else’s card is never uploaded anywhere, which matters, because those are their details and nobody asked them.
And tells you what it missed
Readers get things wrong, and the honest thing is to say so rather than quietly save a blank. If the name, the email or the mobile is missing, it says which — with the photograph still on the screen so you can read it off and type it in.
Where you met them, and what it was about
The reason this exists. Your phone’s address book already holds a name and a number; what it cannot tell you, eighteen months later, is who that was. SARIMA conference, Nairobi — wanted to talk about the innovation fund takes five seconds now and is the only thing that will find them later.
Findable by anything you remember
Search the name, the company, the town, the conference, or what you talked about. “That water person from the Nairobi thing” is a perfectly good search here, and a hopeless one in Contacts.
Their card goes in your pocket and stays there until the jacket is cleaned. This takes a photograph of it and remembers why you kept it.
Your own card, as a QR code
Hold your phone up and they point their camera at it. Their phone offers to add you to their contacts there and then — because the code holds your details themselves, not a link to a website that asks them to install something. It works with no signal, which matters in a hall with four hundred people on one wifi.
Into your contacts, so WhatsApp finds them
One tap puts a scanned card into your phone’s own address book, which is what makes the person turn up in WhatsApp. There are buttons for WhatsApp, email and calling straight from the card as well — and a number written the British or American way is understood, not mangled.
Nothing is uploaded
No account, no sign-in, and the app’s address has no server behind it at all — so there is nowhere for a contact to be sent even in principle. Everything sits on your phone, and you can export the lot at any time as a file any phone can read.
Nothing to install, if you would rather not
It opens in a browser like any page. Add it to your home screen and it behaves like an app and works offline — but that is your choice, not a wall in front of the door.
That pile of cards on your desk
Start with one. Photograph it, put right whatever the reader got wrong, and it is safe.
Open CardPal