--- title: "VCF to CSV" description: "Turn an iPhone, Android, Gmail or Outlook .vcf contacts export into a CSV with one row per contact. Names, phones, emails and addresses in their own columns. Photos are left out and nothing is uploaded." url: https://findutils.com/convert/vcf-to-csv/ category: convert --- # VCF to CSV Turn an iPhone, Android, Gmail or Outlook .vcf contacts export into a CSV with one row per contact. Names, phones, emails and addresses in their own columns. Photos are left out and nothing is uploaded. **Use this tool:** [VCF to CSV](https://findutils.com/convert/vcf-to-csv/) ## Programmatic access - REST id `vcf-to-csv`: POST https://api.findutils.com/api/tools/vcf-to-csv/execute (reference: https://findutils.com/api/vcf-to-csv/) - MCP tool `vcf_to_csv` on https://mcp.findutils.com (reference: https://findutils.com/mcp/vcf-to-csv/) ## Why Use Our VCF to CSV Converter? A .vcf file is the one format every phone and every mail client agrees on, and it is the one format no spreadsheet opens. So the export that was supposed to make contacts portable makes them unreadable instead: hundreds of cards, each a block of tagged lines, when what you needed was a table with a name column and a phone column. Retyping is the usual answer and it is a bad one, because a hundred contacts is an afternoon and one typo is a number that never rings. This page reads the file, pulls the fields into columns, and hands back a spreadsheet. It runs entirely in your browser, which for an address book is the whole point. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### How do I export contacts as a .vcf file? iPhone: the simplest whole-book route is iCloud.com, Contacts, select all, then the gear menu and Export vCard. Android: Contacts app, Settings, then Export to .vcf file. Gmail: Google Contacts, Export, and choose the vCard option. Outlook desktop: select the contacts in the People view, then File and Save As, or use Import/Export for the whole folder. All of them produce the multi-card file this page reads. ### Does it handle a file with hundreds of contacts? Yes. A .vcf export is one file holding one card after another, and every card in it is read in a single pass. The page accepts a file up to 10 MB, which is a very large address book once photos are ignored. ### Which vCard versions are supported? 2.1, 3.0 and 4.0, which is everything in circulation. The awkward parts of each are handled: quoted-printable encoding and bare parameters in 2.1, backslash escapes in 3.0, and URI-style phone values and numeric preference in 4.0. Apple's group prefixes, such as item1.TEL, are read rather than dropped. ### Why are there both a phone column and a phones column? Because both are useful and they answer different questions. The phone column holds one number, preferring the one the card marks as preferred, which is what you want when sorting or mail-merging. The phones column holds every number with its type, for example +15551234 (CELL); +15559999 (WORK), which is what you want when nothing may be lost. Emails work the same way. ### What happened to the contact photos? They are left out and counted. A photo is stored inside the card as base64 image data, often tens of thousands of characters, and putting that in a spreadsheet cell makes the file unusable. The number of photos left out appears under the output so you know they were there. ### The accented characters in my names are broken elsewhere. Will they be here? No. Quoted-printable values are decoded into bytes first and read as text afterwards, which is the only order that survives a multi-byte character. Decoding each escape separately is what turns a name like Ayşe into mojibake, and it is the usual bug in tools of this kind. Older files that declare a Latin-1 or Windows-1252 charset are handled too, and an unfamiliar charset is reported rather than silently guessed. ### How is the address column built? vCard stores an address in seven parts: post office box, extended address, street, city, region, post code and country. They are joined in reading order and empty parts are left out, so a card with only a street and a city gives a clean two-part address rather than a row of commas. A contact with several addresses contributes the preferred one, or the home one, or the first. ### Why is one of my contacts missing? A card with no name, no email address and no phone number carries nothing a spreadsheet can use, so it is skipped and counted under the output. A card embedded inside another card as an assistant record is also not treated as a separate contact, which is deliberate. ### Is my address book uploaded? No. The file is parsed and converted in your browser, and no request carries it. This is the tool on the site where that matters most: a contacts export holds every number and address of everyone you know. Watch the network panel while converting and nothing leaves. ### Can I convert the CSV back into a .vcf? Yes, with FindUtils CSV to VCF, the reverse of this page. It reads the column names VCF to CSV writes, so a contact list can go from .vcf to CSV for cleaning and back to one .vcf file without losing names, emails, phones or addresses. ## Related Tools - [CSV to VCF](https://findutils.com/convert/csv-to-vcf/) - [Bookmarks HTML to CSV](https://findutils.com/convert/bookmarks-html-to-csv/) - [CSV Viewer](https://findutils.com/convert/csv-viewer/) - [CSV to Excel](https://findutils.com/convert/csv-to-excel/) - [JSON to CSV](https://findutils.com/convert/json-to-csv/) - [ICS to CSV](https://findutils.com/convert/ics-to-csv/)