What's new in cardlio

3.2.25 and 3.2.27

A cleaner photo, fewer fields to fix.

Two things change what you get from a scan: the saved photo now follows the card's own edges, and more of the address comes out right the first time. Both apply to new scans; cards already in your library stay as they are.

Cut along the card's own edges

cardlio now cuts a card along its four edges and straightens it, so a card photographed slightly at an angle comes out square, with no strip of table along one side. Cards that run off the edge of the photo, or carry a coloured band along one edge, are cut cleanly too. When it can't trace all four edges reliably, it keeps a straight cut. Prefer the earlier cut everywhere? Choose Straight rectangle under Card cut in Settings.

The address, read from the photo

With Apple's Private Cloud Compute as your AI provider, the address and company are also read from the card's photo while you review a scan, so building, unit, city, postcode and country come out right much more often. Each photo is sent once, and you can switch this off with Read the Address from the Photo in Settings. On a Mac with the local address reader installed, the local reader does this instead, and the photo stays on your Mac.

Sharper reading

An address that wraps onto a second line stays in one piece, a building name in front of the house number goes to the building field, and an e-mail address with stray marks around the "@" is still recognised. A card that prints two offices side by side keeps one office's address and puts the other in the notes, and a founding year printed under the logo no longer ends up in the street.

Smaller updates for the local reader

On the Mac, updating the local address reader now downloads only the files that changed.

3.2.13 and later

After the fair, in fewer steps.

The days after a fair decide whether a stack of cards turns into business. cardlio now carries you through them: rate people while you scan, hand on one report, and work through the follow-up emails in one sitting.

Rate while the conversation is fresh

In Event mode, Hot, Warm or Cold now sits at the top of each scanned card in the review — one tap, before the next person walks up to the stand.

One report per fair

Event Report puts everyone you met at one event in one document, hot leads first, with your rating, what they were interested in and whether you still owe them a follow-up. Export it as a PDF for whoever you report your leads to, or as a CSV for a spreadsheet or CRM.

The follow-ups, one after another — now on iPhone too

Follow-Up Run takes you through everyone from one event: a drafted email for each, written on your device by Apple Intelligence where it is available, which you read, change and send from your own mail app — then on to the next. People you have already followed up are left out. cardlio itself sends nothing.

Your cards in Contacts

On iPhone and iPad, switch on Show cards in Contacts and your scanned cards appear in the Contacts app as cardlio's own read-only list, so Phone, Mail and Messages find them by name. Nothing is copied into your iCloud, Google or Outlook contacts, your ratings and notes stay in cardlio, and switching it off removes the list at once.

Check a VAT number

cardlio reads a company's VAT or tax number — P.IVA, USt-IdNr., TVA, BTW, VAT No. — into a field of its own. Tap Check in VIES and the European Commission confirms an EU number is valid, with the registered name and address. Only the number is sent, and only when you tap.

Get a ride to the address

On iPhone, Get a Ride under a card's address opens your ride app or Maps with the destination filled in where the app allows it. The address is copied too, for apps that can't take it.

Two offices on one card

When a card prints a second office, the first one fills the address and the other goes into the notes under Other locations, word for word, instead of being mixed into one street.

Phone numbers the way your CRM wants them

Contact format in Settings chooses how numbers are stored — International (+39 030 231 0794), Compact or Plain, always the full international number — how an extension is written, and whether surname, company and city go in capitals. Apply to All Cards brings the existing library in line after telling you how many cards change.

The registered name, one tap away

After a VIES check, Apply to card copies the registered company name and address into the fields you tick — a card from a branch office can keep its own address and still take the registered name.

Your CRM stays up to date

The webhook can now send the cards you already have with Send All Cards, send a card again after you edit it, and retry a post that failed because of the network. Every post says whether the card is new or updated, so your CRM can update the contact instead of adding it twice. How to set it up →

3.2.2 and 3.2.4

Every card opens as a clean contact sheet.

Open a saved card and it reads like a contact, not a form. Where you met, the lead rating, the follow-up and keep in touch sit as chips at the top — tap one to set it. Each e-mail and number has its own row with a call or write button beside it, and the address reads the way an envelope does, in the order its country writes it, with the local time there.

Change the address, tap Done, and cardlio checks the new one on Apple Maps straight away. Check again, open in Maps and remove from the map are one tap away in the ⋯ menu.

Your card, wherever people look

Turn your own card into an e-mail signature with a Save my contact link and an optional QR code, or into a background for Zoom, Teams and Meet with a QR code the people on the call can scan to save you. Both are free.

Voice notes that spell names right

Say what you talked about while it is fresh — hold the microphone, or tap to start and tap to stop, now on the Mac too. cardlio already knows whose card it is, so the name and company come out as printed on the card, not as speech recognition guessed them. It all runs on your device.

Lock the library

An optional Face ID, Touch ID or passcode lock, in Settings. On the Mac it also locks when the Mac sleeps. Off unless you switch it on.

Coming from another card app?

cardlio reads the vCard, CSV and Excel exports of other scanner apps, Outlook and Google, skips anyone already in your library and tidies the phone numbers on the way in. Your old app's work is not lost, and nothing has to be retyped.

3.2

Two hundred cards. Which five do you call first?

A stack of cards is not a list of leads until someone says which ones matter. Rate a card Hot, Warm or Cold while the conversation is still in your head — in the review right after the scan, or later on the card — and add your own interest tags for what they asked about.

Ratings that travel

A flame, a sun or a snowflake marks each card in the library, and you can search by rating or by interest. The rating goes where your leads go: into the CSV for Salesforce or Outlook, to your CRM webhook, and to the team library so the stand sees who is worth a call. It is never written into a vCard — a vCard is also how you share a contact, and your opinion of someone is not part of it.

Keep in touch

For the people worth more than one email, tell cardlio how often you want to be in touch. It shows who is due, drafts a short note on your own device, and can hand a repeating reminder to Reminders. cardlio sends no notifications of its own and tracks no pipeline — it only remembers what you asked it to.

Who is this?

Before the call, one tap in Company Insights looks the person up on the web with your own Claude or Gemini key, and shows what it found together with its sources. It runs only when you tap, sends the name, company, title, website and city — never an e-mail address or a phone number — and saves nothing to the card unless you say so.

3.0 and 3.1

One pile of cards for the whole stand.

At a fair you are rarely scanning alone. A team is a shared library for one event or project: everyone on it adds cards, reads them in full, and claims the ones they will follow up — so two people never chase the same lead.

Invite by Apple Account, nothing shared by accident

Create a team, add each colleague by the e-mail address or phone number of their Apple Account, and send them the invite link. The link opens the team only for people on the list. Nothing you scan is shared automatically: a card reaches the team when someone deliberately sends it there — a selection on the Mac, Select Multiple on iPhone, or the whole day's cards from the event chip.

Claim a lead — or all of them

Tap a team card to read it in full — photo, every field, who shared it and when. Claiming it puts your own copy in your library and shows the team it is taken; Add all unclaimed takes every open lead in one go, and a card a colleague already claimed can still be added to your library as a copy. Pull down, or press Refresh, to see what the stand added since. The team keeps a smaller photo than your original, so it stays light on everyone's iCloud.

Colleagues on Windows or Android

team.cardlio.app opens the team in any browser, and it works both ways. Colleagues sign in with their Apple Account, join from the invite, search the cards, claim leads — one or all — and download them as vCard, CSV, or everything as one ZIP with the photos. They can add people they met by typing them in or dropping a vCard file, and fix a typo for the whole team. New cards arrive while the page is open, and it installs like an app on a Windows PC or an Android phone. Like the app, it talks to Apple's iCloud directly — there is no server of ours in between, and we never see a team.

2.6 · made for iOS 27 and macOS 27

Ask Siri about the people you met.

Siri now knows your cards as people. Ask “who did I meet at the expo who does logistics?” and it answers from your library; say “text the person from Tristar” and the card goes straight to Messages, or to Mail on the Mac. It's the same index Spotlight already keeps — nothing leaves your device.

Point the camera at a card

On iPhone, hold the Camera Control or open visual intelligence, tap Search, and cardlio appears with the name and company already read. Tap it and the review sheet opens with every card on that frame — nothing is saved until you've looked at it.

Apple's Private Cloud Compute, no key needed

Refine name, title and company with Apple's much larger model — no API key, no account, and Apple's servers keep nothing: the request is encrypted to the machines that answer it and erased when they're done. Pick it as the provider in Settings and it runs the Refine button, the pronunciation guide, industry tags and the automatic polish. Apple sets a daily allowance per person; cardlio shows where you stand, and when it's reached the polish simply carries on on your device. Claude and Gemini stay available with your own key, and Company Insights keeps using them because it reads the live web.

On earlier versions of iOS and macOS everything else works exactly as before.

2.6

Their QR code, their NFC card, a screenshot, the back of the card.

More and more cards carry a QR code that opens a hosted contact page rather than a contact. cardlio recognises those, keeps the printed website as the website, and offers to fetch the contact details — one tap, and only when you say so, because the visit reaches the card owner's provider.

A screenshot works too

Share a screenshot of an e-mail signature, a chat message or a profile into cardlio and it reads the whole screen, keeping the block that carries the contact — name, title, company, phones, e-mail, address. The subject line and the rest of the screen are left out. On iPhone the system's text reader sometimes misses small grey type and links outright; cardlio spots the gap and re-reads those lines close up, and marks anything it could only read the quick way for a check.

Tap their NFC business card

On iPhone, More → Tap NFC Card… reads a Popl, Linq, Mobilo or cardlio tag. A tag that carries the contact is added on the spot; a tag that links to a contact page is offered first, exactly like a QR link. Two cardlio users need no network at all — the card is inside the link.

Address on the back? Both sides count

Refine sends the front and the back of the card to Claude, Gemini or Apple's model, so an address printed on the back is read too. The built-in reader handles building names like “One JLT” and district names like “Jumeirah Lakes Towers” properly, and files a P.O. Box where it belongs.

E-mail addresses are checked

When an e-mail's domain doesn't exist — usually one misread letter — the review sheet says so and offers the corrected address with one tap. Only the domain name leaves your device, to the same resolver every app uses.

2.5.11

Ask your network a question.

“Who did I meet in Singapore who works in shipping?” Ask it the way you'd say it out loud, and cardlio answers — and lists the cards the answer came from, so you can check it rather than take its word.

It never asks a model to find the person. The model only decides what to search for, your own device does the searching, and the answer may name only cards that search actually found. An invented colleague has no card to attach to, so one can't appear. Names, job titles, companies, cities, industries, event tags and the notes you wrote yourself are all searched.

No account and nothing to pay per question. With Apple’s Private Cloud Compute as your AI provider, Apple’s larger model writes the answer from the few cards the search found; otherwise it runs on your device and works on a plane. Included with the app rather than sold as an extra. Needs Apple Intelligence.

Straight into your CRM

Every card you save can be posted to a web address you choose. Point it at a Zapier or Make hook and cards land in Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive and most other systems; point it at your own server and do as you like with them. It stays off until you switch it on, the address is one you enter, and the card photo is never sent. It is the only feature that sends your cards to a destination you choose — and only because you told it to. Step-by-step recipes for Zapier and Make →

Tag the event afterwards

Most people scan the stack on the flight home, long after the moment to switch on Event mode has gone. Now you can select a pile of cards and tag them all at once — on the Mac from the right-click menu, on iPhone and iPad from Select Multiple.

2.5.8 · iPhone

The phone rings, and you already know who it is.

Scan someone's card and their number stops arriving as a stranger. When they call, iPhone shows their name and company right on the incoming-call screen — the same place a saved contact would appear, without adding anyone to your address book.

Every caller-ID app you have ever installed did this by sending your calls to a server to be looked up. cardlio doesn't. The numbers from your own cards are handed to iOS through Apple's own Call Directory and stay on the phone: nothing is uploaded, and no lookup service ever learns who is calling you.

Switch it on in cardlio's settings and once in iOS Settings, and every card you scan from then on joins it. Switch it off whenever you like. iPhone only — macOS has no equivalent to hook into.

2.5

The card was never the point. The email after it was.

Mark the people you owe an email while you're still reviewing the scan — one tap, and only for the ones that mattered. cardlio never guesses who was important; you decide, at the one moment you still remember the conversation.

Afterwards a dot marks them in your library and a single filter shows you everyone still waiting. Hand any of them to Reminders and the person, the company and where you met come along. cardlio doesn't read your mail and never claims a message was sent — the list is yours to clear.

Cards you couldn't read before

Tap Translate on a Chinese or Japanese card and the job title, company and address arrive in your language — on your own device, with the card keeping exactly what was printed on it. The translation stays with the card: it syncs to your other devices, exports with the contact, and you can search it — typing “Yusen Building” finds the card that prints 郵船ビル. Names stay as they were written, and become searchable in the Latin alphabet too: typing “shiquan” finds 黒士鎣.

A copy that's yours

Back up your whole library to one zip — photos, both sides, every field, plus a vCard per contact — and restore it on any Mac or iPhone. Open formats, so even without cardlio the photos are photos and the contacts are contacts.