The card scanner was being handed sideways photographs
Scan a card and the name came back wrong, the telephone number backwards, and the email address missing entirely. It was tempting to blame the reader and buy a better one. The reader was fine. It was being handed photographs the wrong way up, at a size it could not finish, and then having its correct answer shuffled by our own code on the way out.
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What you were seeing
Photograph a visiting card and the fields came back half empty. A job title where the name should be. A mobile number with its digits in the wrong order. No email address at all, on cards that plainly carry one.
The obvious conclusion is that the reading software is not good enough, and the obvious fix is to pay for a better one. We measured before spending anything, against real photographs of real cards, and the reader turned out to be doing its job.
Three things were wrong, and none of them was the reader
Your phone's photographs were arriving sideways
A phone saves a picture however its camera happens to be mounted, and writes a note inside the file saying which way up it really belongs. Every photo app obeys that note, which is why the picture looks perfectly normal to you. The reader did not obey it, and worked on the sideways original. The best photograph in our test produced the worst result: a website address came back spelled backwards, and so did a telephone number.
The pictures were too large to finish
A modern phone camera produces twelve megapixels. Reading one at full size took over a minute and a half on our server, against a thirty-second limit, so the reading was abandoned, and the card arrived with a photograph, no fields, and nothing anywhere explaining why. Reduced to a sensible size, the same card now reads every field in under four seconds. It is not just faster; it is more accurate, because there is less background noise to mistake for text.
And our own code shuffled the answer
Having read the card correctly, we then re-ordered the words ourselves on the assumption that all text runs left to right. On a card lying at an angle, that reversed every line. The reader saw “Chief Operating Officer” and we turned it into “Officer Operating Chief”. It saw a telephone number and we printed it backwards. That is fixed at the cause rather than patched at the symptom.
What it does now
Before anything is read, the photograph is turned the right way up using the note your phone left in it. A card lying sideways on the table is then stood upright as well, which is a separate problem and needed a separate answer: the note in the file says how the phone was held, not how the card was lying.
The picture is then reduced to a size the reader can actually finish, and read with the setting that suits a business card: a single column of text at varying sizes, which is a fair description of every card ever printed.
One more change worth explaining. We were asking the reader to consider English and Hindi on every single card. That sounds generous and is the opposite. Offered two alphabets, it finds Hindi in things that are not writing at all. A card photographed on a brown cloth produced pages of nonsense and no card. Cards are now read as English, and the Indian language packs stay installed for when an event is set up to expect them.
The difference, on real cards
Measured on the same photographs, before and after. A card whose address stopped at “Mumbai” and the first digit of the postcode now reads the full postcode. A card photographed sideways, which previously produced a wrong name and a reversed number, now gives the name, the job title, the telephone number, the email address and the website. A card that previously produced nothing usable at all now reads in under seven seconds.
A photograph of a piece of cloth, taken by accident, still correctly produces nothing. That matters as much as the rest: a reader that invents fields from a picture of fabric is worse than one that admits it cannot see a card.
What is still not right, said plainly: the company name is often picked up from the wrong line, and on one card the person’s name still comes back as noise. Those are separate rules about which line means what, and they are next. They are worth doing now for the first time, because the text reaching them is finally correct.
Does this affect anything you already have?
Cards you have already scanned are untouched, deliberately. Re-reading them would overwrite anything you corrected by hand at review with a fresh machine guess, and your correction is worth more than the guess. If an old card has fields you want filled in, photograph it again.
Nothing needs updating on your phone. This is all on the server, so it applies to cards scanned from the app and the browser alike, from now on.
No setting changed and no card was deleted, reclassified or re-read.
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