Turn your contact details into a QR code anyone can scan to save you — generated in your browser.
A contact QR code carries a vCard: the same small text file your phone exchanges when it shares a contact. Point a camera at it and the phone offers to create the contact with the name, phone numbers, email, company and website already filled in — no typing, no photo of a business card that never gets transcribed. This tool writes vCard 3.0, the version Android and iOS import most reliably; version 4.0 is newer and stricter, but a noticeable share of address books still ignore parts of it.
Inside, a vCard is a list of property lines separated by CRLF, wrapped between BEGIN:VCARD and END:VCARD. N holds the structured name in five semicolon-separated components (last, first, middle, prefix, suffix) and FN holds the display name; TEL;TYPE=CELL and TEL;TYPE=WORK,VOICE hold the numbers, and EMAIL, ORG, TITLE and URL hold the rest. Two details decide whether the card actually imports. First, semicolons, commas and backslashes typed inside a value have to be escaped, otherwise a surname like "Gonçalves; Jr" splits the name into the wrong components. Second, a field you left blank must not become a line: a stray TEL;TYPE=CELL: with nothing after the colon makes several address books reject the whole card, so empty fields are dropped here instead of being written out. The finished text is encoded as UTF-8 bytes, which is what keeps accented names intact.
The practical uses are the ones where typing is the bottleneck: a conference badge, the last slide of a talk, a shop window, the back of a printed card, or an email signature. A QR code holds a couple of thousand characters at most, so a card with every field filled produces a denser image that has to be printed larger to scan well — the fewer fields, the more forgiving the code. Everything here is computed in JavaScript on your device: your name, numbers and email are never uploaded.
No. Every field you type stays on your device: the vCard and the QR image are built by JavaScript in this page, and nothing is sent to a server, stored in a database or written to a log. The .vcf download is assembled locally too.
It is the plain-text file format behind the QR code — the standard way to exchange a contact. Opening it on a phone or in an email client offers to add the contact to the address book, which makes it a good attachment when a QR code is not practical.
They are left out of the card entirely. That is deliberate: an empty property line such as TEL;TYPE=CELL: with no value is invalid, and some address books discard the whole contact when they find one.
Yes. The text is encoded as UTF-8 bytes, so names with á, ç, ñ or any other non-ASCII character are read back exactly as typed. The same applies to semicolons and commas inside a name, which are escaped before going into the card.
No — a QR code is a static image and carries a frozen copy of the data. If a number changes you have to generate a new code. When details change often, point the QR code at a short link instead and update the destination behind it.
Because every extra field adds characters, and more characters mean more modules in the same square. If the code is hard to scan, remove the fields you do not need and print it larger — a dense code needs roughly 3 cm on paper to read comfortably.
Vai.la creates short links and QR Codes with click tracking, for free.
Vai.la is not responsible for how the tools are used or for decisions made based on their results.