scanning business cards to contacts

Report · Jun 19, 2018

I was experimenting with the new feature of scanning business cards to contacts in the iOS, and in the most simplistic form it works ok. It has trouble with reflective surfaces, but for the most part, it got most of the info correct on the first pass.

What frustrates me about this app is that the automation fails to recognize, addresses, job titles, basically anything on the card that isn't name or phone number ( and it often misplaces which phone number is associated with things like cell, business, etc...

I'll be the first to suggest this is user error, as I have found no clear instructions on the proper way to set this app up. My first question would be, has anyone had success making it work for things other than name or phone number?

Has anyone figured out how to incorporate a 2 sided business card into contact?

And is there any easy way to copy the scan as the photo for that contact when creating the contact, so even if the OCR makes a mistake, you still have a copy of the business card that can be viewed when searching your contacts?

Thanks for your feedback!

Report · Jun 26, 2018

I don’t have an option to save the scanned business card as a contact. Is there a setting my to do this?

also, how do I find which version I have?

Report · Jun 26, 2018

Adobe Scan version 18.06.19

Report · Jun 26, 2018

Yep, that's the one I have. It simply does not work. Pretty useless.

Randy Becker, M.Ed.

Photography Professor

Department Chair

Media Technologies

College of Southern Nevada

3200 E. Cheyenne Ave., NLV-A1727

North Las Vegas, NV 89030

(702) 651-4183

Report · Jun 26, 2018

you have to save it as a PDF first, after it uploads, then it gives you an option to save contact... but that's about where I couldn't make it do what I wanted it to do...

It has potential, but a few written instructions might improve performance

Report · Jun 26, 2018

Hi,

After saving it as a PDF, I have three icons at the bottom of the screen:

the Share icon (box with the arrow), a crop icon, and a trashcan icon.

When I select the Share icon, I am presented with

1. Share link

2. Email

3. Share a copy

As you can see, there is nothing at all mentioning contacts.

Randy Becker, M.Ed.

Photography Professor

Department Chair

Media Technologies

College of Southern Nevada

3200 E. Cheyenne Ave., NLV-A1727

North Las Vegas, NV 89030

(702) 651-4183

Report · Jun 26, 2018

you have to wait for it to "upload" to the cloud, after which you'll have 3 options..

( works better on wifi, via cellular, it seems to take much longer than I would expect )

share, open in acrobat or save contact

Report · Jun 26, 2018

Thank you!

Now how does one upload to the cloud? Is there a button or is this automatic?

And then how do I find it to make a contact?

Randy Becker, M.Ed.

Photography Professor

Department Chair

Media Technologies

College of Southern Nevada

3200 E. Cheyenne Ave., NLV-A1727

North Las Vegas, NV 89030

(702) 651-4183

Report · Jun 27, 2018

Hi, I had the same problem as you did not see a contact export button. My solution was to change text recognition language, from Swedish to English, and now the button appeared.

Report · Aug 17, 2018

I had the same issue as you. The Save it to Contacts did not appear. I am using am Iphone X.

Now i tried with my Iphone 6S and it works, the Save it to Contacts appears.

Good lucK.

Report · Aug 13, 2018

Alongside these other Users of Adobe Scan, I often get frustrated by the frequent ‘Save as PDF’ being the only Export option available. Earlier on (after Instal) each of my iOS devices gave an ‘Add to Contacts’ as an additional option. There were 3 options, yet most recently only 2 appear. I understand why there may be occasionally OCR recognition, yet with no Online explanations many Users will lose interest. (Great Adobe leap forward, yet it may crawl back into extinction?)

Report · Nov 21, 2018

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.

Report · Jul 04, 2019

I don’t have any answers unfortunately but here to share my experience- all consistent with others here. My biggest issue is phone numbers in iOS are ALL listed as Home even when I manually change them all. Super frustrating and makes this system really poor. Along with the inability to recognize company name This isn’t a system I can rely upon Unfortunately and I had high hopes.