I just used the free Adobe Scan on iOS to add a couple hundred business cards to my contacts, and it worked pretty well. I also figured out the (undocumented?) feature where you can select the Company field and use it for all the other information from the card.
The process that I use:
- Start the app. It defaults to "Auto-Capture On" mode, which is very nice when you want to scan in a number of cards. Note that you can only process a maximum of 25 cards at a time with OCR, however, so you probably want to do them in batches.
- Hold the camera over the card and the app will automatically lock on to the card and capture a picture. Repeat this for the other cards in your batch.
- Press the mini-card-stack at the bottom right corner when you are done capturing the card images. This shows you the first scanned card, and you can swipe to see the other cards and individually delete any bad photos. But they probably are OK, so just press "Save PDF" at the top right corner.
- This saves all the cards as PDFs and uploads them to the Adobe server for OCR processing. It may take a minute if you have multiple cards, but when OCR is completed it will add a "Save Contact" choice below the first card image (to the right of the Share Scan and Open In Acrobat choices). You may need to scroll the card image up a bit to see this choice, but do this and select the Save Contact choice.
- If you scanned multiple cards, you will now see a list of them all (already pre-selected), so just press continue to start the process of saving them one-by-one to Contacts. (If you only scanned one card, the app will automatically take you to the next step.)
- You will see the first card with First Name, Last Name, phone numbers and email address filled in. It does a good job of this for almost all cards, although it tends to get confused if there is a fax number in addition to phone and cell numbers on the card (and tends to switch the cell and fax numbers, but you can easily correct that by just selecting the blue "work fax" or "cell" selection and changing them from the list). You can also type into these fields or into the Notes field, or press the '+' button to manually add additional phone numbers or email addresses.
- What's cool, however, is that you can select the Company field. When you do this, it shows a list of all the other words that Adobe managed to OCR from the card, including not just the company name but many other items. Just press on the words and they are inserted into the field in the order that you select them, allowing you to quickly add the company name and other information from the other words on the card. I used this to quickly insert the company name, title and other words that I might want to search on to find this person, and you can also manually type in the field.
- When you are satisfied with the content, press Save at the top right and it is saved to your Contacts and the next card appears. When done with all the cards, you can delete the scanned cards by selecting "All Scans", selecting the set of scanned cards, and pressing the trash can icon.
Now you are probably thinking "why would I want to dump other information, like the person's title and city, into the Company field?" Perhaps it's not ideal, but at least on the Apple platforms it works just fine. When you search contacts, it searches all the fields for matching text, so it really doesn't matter much if a title is in a Company field. And of course, you can always change it later in your Contacts app on the iPhone, iPad or MacBook.
I've tried other ways to scan in business card, including expensive scanners and software. But in terms of ease of use, simplicity and cost (free), I am pretty impressed with using Adobe Scan for adding business cards to Contacts.
1 Correct answer
2
Replies
AdChoices