Tiny Online Tools
Reading a contact file without importing it
A .vcf file is plain text with a strict grammar, and the usual way to look inside one is to import it into an address book — which changes your address book. This opens it and reads it instead.
Three formats that look alike
vCard has three versions and they differ in every detail that matters. 2.1 (1996) writes bare type tokens like TEL;WORK;VOICE:, encodes accented text with ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE, and folds those lines with a trailing = instead of leading whitespace. 3.0 introduced TYPE=WORK,VOICE, ENCODING=b for binary values and the \, \; escape set. 4.0 dropped ENCODING in favour of data: URIs and added PREF=.
All three are read here, and each card's declared version is shown rather than assumed — an exporter writing 3.0 syntax under a 2.1 VERSION line is common enough to matter. Where a 2.1 quirk is actually present in your file it is labelled, because that is usually the reason another program refused to open it.
What is shown
The structured name broken into its five parts, organization and unit, title and role, every email, phone, address, URL and instant-messaging handle with its type labels and any Apple-style X-ABLabel, birthday, anniversary, gender, note, categories, UID, REV, PRODID, time zone, GEO and KIND. Plus every raw property as it appears in the file — name, group, parameters, value — so nothing an exporter wrote is quietly dropped from view.
Photos
An inline PHOTO is decoded from base64 and displayed, with its media type and exact byte count, and can be saved as an image file. When a card's photo is a URL rather than embedded bytes, the URL is shown and not fetched — this tool makes no network requests, so a photo hosted elsewhere stays a link.
Exports
Every card as CSV or JSON, and the selected card back to .vcf — written from the original property lines, so a round trip returns what it read.
Privacy
Contacts are personal data. The file is read in your browser and nothing is uploaded.