Scanning Business Cards

For best possible scanning results, please consider these hints:

• Take photos in a bright environment. But lights or the sun should not reflect on the card.
• Cards need to be clearly distinguishable on the surface. Give attention to a sharp contrast between cards and background. Ideally you put white cards on a dark background and cards with a dark background on a white table or piece of paper.
• Get close to the business card; if it fills most of the screen, the recognition works best.
• Ensure all card edges are within the visible screen area.
• Some angles can be corrected; nevertheless try to have little rotation of the card relative to the border of the photo.
• Often the company name is provided only in form of a logo. This is usually difficult to identify for an OCR software; you may need to insert the company name manually by editing the contact after scanning it.

If you are unhappy with the result of scanning a business card, verify if the following conditions apply, respectively can be improved:

• Not enough contrast between card and background - if the app reports "No cards found" you can nevertheless trigger the scanning . The scanning quality will be equal to the case when a card was identified; just background areas around the card cannot be cut. When cards are not rectangular (oval or special shapes), that will always be the case. And the solution.
• Poor light conditions
• Blurry photos - that can happen although the app attempts to auto-focus before taking a picture. After a few seconds a picture is taken in any case; in such a case, please re-take the image.
• There are business cards with exotic fonts, tiny font size, little contrast between text and card background etc. Often they are hardly readible for humans - even harder for an app ...

Last update: 18.02.2016