A .vcf file is a vCard: an electronic business card. Phones, Google Contacts, Outlook and Apple Contacts all export address books in this format, and one file can hold a single contact or several thousand. Double-clicking one usually imports it straight into a contacts app, which is a poor way to find out what is in it, and some programs, Outlook among them, often show only the first contact of a file that holds many.
This page reads the whole file and shows every contact as a card, so you can check an export, find one number in an old backup, or see what someone sent you before it touches your address book. It is free to use, with no account and no upload limit, and it runs entirely in your browser: nothing is uploaded, and it keeps working offline once it has loaded.
- What is a VCF file?
- A vCard, the standard format for sharing contacts, defined by the IETF. It is plain text, one field per line between BEGIN:VCARD and END:VCARD, which is why opening it in Notepad shows a wall of codes rather than a contact. Photos inside it are stored as text too, which is what makes some VCF files surprisingly large.
- Why does my VCF file only show one contact?
- Many programs read only the first card in a file. Outlook on Windows is the usual culprit with a phone export that holds hundreds of contacts. The contacts are all still in the file, and this page shows every one of them.
- How do I get the contacts onto my phone or computer?
- Import the file. On an iPhone, open the .vcf from Mail or Files and choose to add the contacts. On Android, open the Contacts app and look for Import, then choose the file. In Google Contacts on the web, use Import. On a Mac, double-click the file to add it to Contacts. Looking at it here first means you know what you are about to add, and avoid filling your address book with duplicates.
- Can I open a VCF file in Excel?
- Not usefully: Excel shows each line of the file as a row of codes, not one row per contact. This page does not convert the file to a spreadsheet; it shows every field in a form you can read and search.
- My .vcf file is genetics data, not contacts. What now?
- The same extension is used by the Variant Call Format, which stores genetic variants from DNA sequencing. This page recognises one from its first line and shows its text instead of trying to read it as contacts. Tools made for genomics, such as IGV, are the right way to work with one.
- Are my contacts sent anywhere?
- No. The file is read by this browser tab on your computer, and nothing in it is sent to this site or anyone else. A photo that the card only links to on the web is not fetched either, because loading it would tell that website the card had been opened.