CamCard Business Scanning App For iPhone

CamCard Business Scanning App For iPhone

CamCardAh business cards. We get them, but what the heck do we do with them?

You can scan then with a document scanner of course, but there are some great mobile apps to capture cards on the fly. For example, at a conference, it’s nice to be able to have everything captured in your hotel room.

The nice people at IntSig hooked me up with a review copy of CamCard for iPhone, their business card scanning app. It is in the App Store and seems to vary between $2.99 and $6.99, but there is a free Lite version to try it out. For you Androids out there, there is also an Android version available.

CamCard
CamCard

With that out of the way, how does CamCard work?

Capture

Like all business scanning apps, CamCard uses your phone’s camera to take a picture of the card, and then it processes it.

For best results, you line up the card in the targets as shown below.

CamCard Line up card
CamCard Line up card

The software has a super helpful Batch Mode. When you set this, you can quickly go through capturing a stack of cards, and then it processes them all later. I raced through my stack this way, and it was great.

CamCard Batch Mode
CamCard Batch Mode

Recognition

After you save the captures, it goes through and processes them. All the processing happens on the phone, and your cards don’t get sent to the cloud or anything (unless you want them to – more on that later).

OCR is never 100% perfect, but I found the results of CamCard to be quite good. On “traditional” business cards with a standard layout, it was almost perfect.

CamCard Edit
CamCard Edit

With some of my business cards that do not have a normal layout, it did a good job capturing most of the information, but sometimes I did need to go in and fix the names. It is certainly better than having to type all that stuff in by hand.

The Help says that for best recognition results, have lots of light and have the card fill the screen inside the target areas.

Cloud Sync

CamCard isn’t just an app. The company provides an optional Cloud Sync server. If you sign up for it, all your cards are synchronized up to their server, and you can access your cards on any iOS device, Android device, or online.

Unfortunately CamCard doesn’t seem to be compatible with my Samsung Galaxy Player so I couldn’t test the Android part, but here is the information on their site:

Camcard Online
Camcard Online

If you are going to use CamCard, I recommend either using their Cloud Server or exporting the card information some other way. If something happens to your iPhone or iPod Touch, you don’t want to lose your contacts.

Contact Export

Speaking of exporting, when you are saving your cards you can have them export to your Address Book on your phone, to iCloud, to Gmail, or to Exchange.

CamCard Accounts
CamCard Accounts

From the list of cards, you can also export one or multiple cards to CSV, Excel, or vCard.

CamCard Export
CamCard Export

Card Holder

When your cards are in CamCard, they are saved in what they call the Card Holder.

From the list of cards, if you long-tap one of the cards you can instantly phone, SMS, or e-mail the contact.

When you drill down into a card, you can do the same as well as open up their website, and search LinkedIn or request to add them as a contact.

CamCard CardHolder
CamCard CardHolder

The LinkedIn thing works quite well. I feel sad for those other guys that are stuck with my name.

CamCard
CamCard

I am (thankfully) not someone who has to deal with a lot of business cards, but if I was, I quite like CamCard. It is polished, easy to use, and the OCR is pretty good for something that is not done by humans.

Do you use a business card app on your mobile device? Which one and how do you like it?

About the Author

Brooks Duncan helps individuals and small businesses go paperless. He's been an accountant, a software developer, a manager in a very large corporation, and has run DocumentSnap since 2008. You can find Brooks on Twitter at @documentsnap or @brooksduncan. Thanks for stopping by.

Leave a Reply 15 comments

ANKIT - September 20, 2017 Reply

i just updates to IOS11 and and my is not working. i dowloaded again but new app is not showing my old cards and i m not able to sign in with my old id & password.
please help.

Naval - August 3, 2015 Reply

Hi, I use the paid version of camcard. When I recently changed to the iPhone6 and synced my cards with Outlook, it took all my contacts instead of just updating the cards I had in the card holder. Now I want to delete all the contacts and leave only the cards but don’t know how to do this.
Can you help ?
Regards
Naval

Raj bahadur singh - August 4, 2014 Reply

I like it

David Belaga - June 23, 2014 Reply

Help? I mistakenly deleted the CamCard app, which I found to be great for my business. When I reloaded it, all of groups and individual contacts were gone (they are in my contacts, but not grouped). Is there any way to get them back in CamCard?

    Brooks Duncan - June 23, 2014 Reply

    Not totally sure what can be done, but do you have a backup of your iPhone either in iTunes or in iCloud? Did you use CamCard’s cloud sync at all?

      David - June 23, 2014 Reply

      I am traveling this whole week, but I will check when I get back in the office for an itunes Back-up. I guess I should not use (add more contacts) into the program until I check out the back-up. Do you know if it would sync (merge) the old contacts with the new one’s added in the interim?

MIKE - April 23, 2014 Reply

How do you sync with two phones?
I want my boss to have access to all contacts WITH MY NOTES.
Doesn’t seem to do this and/or no one seems to know.

Seems funny to not sync via cloud between two phones.

Import vCard With Multiple Contacts Into Outlook • Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog - December 3, 2013 Reply

[…] out there, but once you capture the card, what do you do with the data? In the comments to my post about CamCard, awesome DocumentSnap reader Torkjh […]

TC - October 25, 2013 Reply

trying to add a card to an existing group?

Torkjh - June 7, 2013 Reply

Hi, thanks for the post. I have tried to export my contacts into Outlook, but I dont manage to do so. I have tried to select all cards in "card holder", "export to vCard", and send the vCards to my Outlook account. The problem is that it only sends ONE of the contacts as vCard and not all I've selected. Can anyone help me, please?
Thanks a lot!

    sta - November 11, 2013 Reply

    any response on this? I am having the same problem. I have 100+ cards to email to my business account outlook and i dont want to do it 1 at a time.

      Brooks Duncan - November 21, 2013 Reply

      OK, so, it doesn't look like it is a Camcard problem, but rather an Outlook problem. Outlook doesn't have the ability to import more than one contact from a VCF file (weird).

      Some options:

      1) Follow the ideas in this post: http://www.msoutlook.info/question/726

      2) Instead of exporting from CamCard as VCF, export as Excel. Then open the file in Excel, save as CSV, and then import into Outlook as CSV vs. Excel.

      Either way, not super seamless.

mschfer562 - February 8, 2013 Reply

hello, your summary is quite good. Do you have an idea of memory space consumption when having lots of business cards? I am asking because camcard is also saving the scan picture of the business card

@RobAlexander - November 1, 2012 Reply

pjhoerner, I found that you have to tap Edit and then Select All (or select the cards you want to export), then tap the Export icon in the bottom-right corner.

pjhoerner - October 22, 2012 Reply

very helpful – thanks. The only thing that was different from your explanation was the export option. mine lists iPhone, CardDav and CamCard as account options. Then I never could find the option to download to csv or excel file. Any helpful tips there?

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