Card Scanner

A self-hosted business-card scanner — phone snaps, your Mac thinks.

In progress

What it is

A personal tool that turns phone photos of business cards into clean, queryable contact records. The phone is a camera; the work happens on a home Mac. Multi-card per photo, batch review with drill-down, contacts staged before they land in the central database.

Architecture

Phone (any browser) — opens the PWA, takes or picks a multi-card photo, uploads.
Home Mac backend — detects each card in the photo, runs OCR through more than one engine, extracts structured fields, dedupes against existing contacts.
Review UI — batch-first with per-card drill-down. Every contact links back to the card crop, which links back to the source photo and the detection box.
Storage — contacts in a local DB; raw photos in Google Drive under a retention policy.
Access — Cloudflare Tunnel + Cloudflare Access. No inbound ports on the home network; the Mac dials out, and only whitelisted emails get past the login page.

The point

v1 isn't really the scanner — it's the OCR comparison harness. Multiple engines (native phone OCR, PaddleOCR, Claude) run on every card; all outputs are stored; a human-labelled ground-truth set grades them. No engine gets dropped until the data says so.

Status

Active development. Spec at v1, server backend + extraction pipeline running, evaluation harness in place. Screenshots and a longer write-up coming.