How to make a vCard QR code A QR code that saves a contact.

A vCard QR code encodes a small text document in the vCard format, the same format your phone uses when you share a contact. Name, phone, email, company, title and a website, wrapped in a few lines of markup. The phone recognises it and offers to add the contact.

Because the data is inside the code, it works with no internet connection at all. Nothing is fetched. That is the genuine advantage and it is the reason to use one.

It is also the reason it breaks. A QR code holds a fixed amount of data per grid size, so the more characters you cram in, the bigger the grid has to get — and at a fixed printed size, a bigger grid means a smaller black square. Here is the same person, encoded four ways.

Nothing above is an illustration. Each code was generated by the same encoder our free tool uses, and the grid size and character count under each one are read back from the encoder rather than typed in.

The last one is the interesting failure. Adding an address, a second number, a note and a social handle takes the grid from 53 squares across to 89, which at a 20mm print takes each square from 0.38mm down to 0.22mm. It still technically encodes. It just will not scan in a bar.

Include: name, one phone number, one email, company, job title. That is a complete business card and it stays comfortably inside a scannable density.

Cut: a full postal address, a second and third phone number, a photo, social handles, and any note. An address alone can nearly double the payload, as the third code above shows. A photo is not worth discussing; an embedded image will not fit in anything you can scan from a phone.

Then test it the way it will be used. Display it at the size you will actually show it, on the device you will actually show it on, and scan it from about arm’s length in ordinary indoor light. A code that only scans when held six inches away in bright light is a code that will fail in a bar.

It cannot be changed. The details are baked into the shape. Change your number and every printed copy of that code is now wrong, permanently, including the ones on cards in other people’s drawers.

It gives you nothing back. A raw vCard save is a one-way transfer. You do not know it happened, and you leave the conversation with nothing.

A code that points at a page instead stays small and simple regardless of how much is on the card — 29 squares across in the first example, and it would still be 29 if the page behind it held forty links. It updates when you update it, and it can offer an exchange rather than a broadcast. The cost is that it needs signal once, to load the page. That is the real trade: offline and frozen, or online and current.

Which is also why an Apple Wallet pass is a useful place to keep the link version. The pass is stored on your phone, so your code opens offline, and it updates itself when you change your details. The person scanning it still needs signal once, to load the page.

Our vCard QR generator makes the raw kind and works whether or not you ever create a card with us. If you want the link kind, that is what a Cardr address is: a short URL with a page behind it that shows your details, saves to contacts with a tap, and takes their details back with one more.