VCF viewer: open a phone's contacts file as a table

What it shows

• Every contact in a table. Name, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, organisation, address, birthday, whether there is a photo, the note, and a duplicate flag. Search by any of them (a number matches however it is spaced) and sort by any column. The table draws only the rows on screen, so an address book of 20,000 contacts scrolls as easily as one of 20.
• Each contact in full. Tap a row: every number and address with its label (Mobile, Work fax, or the custom label an iPhone stores, such as “Boatyard”), the name split into its parts, birthday, anniversary, categories, the photo at full size with a button to save it, and every field this page does not interpret, exactly as written.
• Duplicates. Contacts that share a phone number or e-mail address are grouped. Numbers are compared by their digits: +45 20 12 34 56, 0045 20123456 and 20 12 34 56 match, and so do +46 70 123 45 67 and 070-123 45 67. E-mail addresses match in any letter case. Press Merge on a group and it becomes one contact with every number, address and note of the ones it replaces; where they disagree (two birthdays, say), the page tells you which it kept.
• Exports. A CSV in the column layout Google Contacts imports, a CSV in the layout Outlook imports, all contacts as one clean vCard 3.0 file in UTF-8, and each contact as its own .vcf (all of them in one .zip, or one at a time from its card). The single-contact .vcf is the contact's lines exactly as they are in your file.

Versions and encodings it reads

vCard 2.1 (Nokia and other older phones, Outlook, many Android exports), 3.0 (iPhone, Mac and iCloud, Google Contacts) and 4.0 (RFC 6350). The parser was written for this page from the three specifications, with no contacts library.

• Quoted-printable. Android and Outlook write names with accents as N;CHARSET=UTF-8;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:=C3=86r=C3=B8;S=C3=B8ren, sometimes broken over lines with a trailing =. That decodes to Ærø; Søren.
• Old character sets. A value marked CHARSET=ISO-8859-1, windows-1252, KOI8-R, Shift_JIS, Big5 or any other set your browser knows is read in that set. A file with no CHARSET that is not valid UTF-8 is read as Windows-1252 (Western European), and the page says so.
• Folded lines, photos and 4.0 values. Long lines folded at 75 bytes are joined again, even when the fold falls inside a letter. Photos stored inside the file (BASE64, ENCODING=b or a 4.0 data: address) are shown. 4.0 phone numbers written as tel: addresses, PREF=1, and birthdays without a year (--0415) are read.

What it cannot do

• Sync, or write back to your phone or account. It only reads, and saves files. To bring a merged or cleaned list back, import the saved .vcf or CSV into your contacts app yourself, and delete the old entries there; nothing on your phone changes.
• Fetch anything. A photo given as a web address (a 4.0 PHOTO:https://…) is shown as text and not loaded.
• Interpret groups and custom fields. Group cards (vCard 4.0 KIND:group with MEMBER lines, Apple's X-ADDRESSBOOKSERVER-KIND:group), social profiles, instant-messaging handles, Android's X-ANDROID-CUSTOM and every other X- field are listed raw on the contact's card. They go into the vCard 3.0 export as written, but not into either CSV.
• Find duplicates by name. Two entries for the same person with no number or address in common are not flagged. A number is only matched to a longer one (with a country code in front) when the shorter has at least 8 digits, so a 7-digit local number written without its area code is not matched.
• Put photos in a CSV. Neither Google's nor Outlook's CSV carries a picture. Use the .vcf exports to keep photos. Outlook's layout has three e-mail slots and one slot per kind of number; anything that does not fit is added to the Notes column rather than dropped.

Getting the .vcf file

iPhone

In the Contacts app (iOS 16 or later), tap Lists at the top left, touch and hold All Contacts (or an account's list), then Export. That saves one .vcf with every contact. One contact alone: open it and tap Share Contact. On a computer, icloud.com › Contacts › select all, then Export vCard.

Android

In Google's Contacts app: Fix & manage › Export to file, which writes a .vcf to the phone's Downloads. On a Samsung phone's own Contacts app: Manage contacts › Import or export contacts › Export.

Google Contacts on a computer

contacts.google.com › Export, then “vCard (for iOS Contacts)”. The Google CSV option there gives a CSV, which the CSV viewer opens.

Outlook and Mac

Classic Outlook for Windows saves one contact as .vcf (open it, then File › Save As); a whole address book only exports as CSV. On a Mac, select contacts in the Contacts app, then File › Export › Export vCard.

Useful to know about contact files

Why names show up as “Søren” after an import

The letter ø is two bytes in UTF-8, C3 B8. A program that reads those bytes as Western European (ISO-8859-1) shows them as two letters, Ã and ¸. It happens when a vCard 2.1 file has no CHARSET and the importer guesses the wrong one. Open the file here, check the names look right, and save it as vCard 3.0 in UTF-8 (the “All as one vCard 3.0” button), which contacts apps normally read as UTF-8.

Why the same person is in your phone three times

Contacts saved to the SIM card, to the phone itself and to a Google or iCloud account are separate entries. When a phone is replaced and all of them are copied over, each person can arrive once per place they were stored, often with the number written differently (+46 70… from the account, 070… from the SIM). The duplicate groups on this page catch exactly that.

Which file to import where

iPhone and iCloud import vCard (.vcf) only, not CSV. Google Contacts imports both. Outlook imports CSV for a whole address book; a .vcf opens there one contact at a time.

What version your file is

The line VERSION: after each BEGIN:VCARD says it, and the summary at the top of the table counts contacts by version. One file can mix versions; each contact is read by its own.