Photograph the stack of cards from a conference and get contact rows with name, title, company, email, phone, and website already filled in, each one carrying the event it came from and a one-line note about the conversation. The stack stops living in a jacket pocket until it is too late to follow up.
The app embedded on this page is the Quick Apps Lead Capture, a real Taskade Genesis build you can submit to right now. It captures typed contact details rather than photographed ones, which makes it the closest starting point: click "Use this app" to clone it in about ten seconds, add a File field for the card photo, then let the reading and extraction steps fill the fields people are typing today.
The build is designed for the walk back to the hotel. A Contacts Project holds one row per person. A published form takes a File field for the card photo, an event picker, and a short note box you fill while the conversation is still fresh. The Convert File to Text step reads the card, and business cards are a good case for it: small, dense, often in a stylized typeface, and always a photograph rather than a document. An Ask Agent step returns full name, job title, company, email, phone, website, and postal address as named fields, and normalizes obvious formatting so a phone number arrives usable. The card image attaches to the contact, so a misread character is fixed by looking rather than guessing.
The contact list renders where the follow-up happens:
- Table view for the full contact list with company, title, and event
- Board view to move new contacts through To Contact, Contacted, and Nurturing
- Calendar view to place follow-up dates so nothing slips past the first week
- Plus List, Mind Map, Gantt, and Org Chart across the 7 project views
Automations make the follow-up happen. With Taskade automations, a new contact creates a follow-up task dated two days out, drafts a first message that references your note, and posts a summary of the event haul to your team channel. Across 100+ bidirectional integrations, forms pull cards in while Gmail and Slack push the follow-up out. The AI agents inside the app carry 34 built-in tools including web search and persistent memory, so an agent can enrich a thin card with a company description before you write.
Capture during the event, not after it. The note field is the part that makes a card worth keeping, and it is only accurate while the conversation is still in your head, so photograph and type one line before you put the card in your pocket. Agree the note convention with your team beforehand, something as simple as what they need and when to follow up, and the whole event produces a usable list instead of a stack of names. Set the follow-up automation before you travel rather than after you get back, because the week you return is exactly when nobody has time to configure anything.
Clone the app, invite the team who went to the event, and the contacts, the images, and the follow-up rules are yours.
Read File Uploads in Your App for how the upload control behaves on a phone, Read Scanned Paperwork and Photos for what is read off an image, and Build a Document Intake App for the pattern. Browse live builds in the Community Gallery, explore AI agents, or start from the templates library. Pair this with Capture Handwritten Notes as Real Action Items so the notes from the same event land beside the people, and Read Scanned Resumes Into a Ranked Candidate Board when the event is a hiring fair.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can it read a card with a stylized layout?
Usually. Cards are small and dense, so fill the frame and keep the card flat. The image attaches to the contact record, which means a character the reading step got wrong is corrected by looking at the card rather than emailing the person to ask.
Can I photograph several cards at once?
One card per photo gives the cleanest result. If you shoot a group, ask in the prompt for a list of contacts rather than a single set of fields, and write each one as its own row.
Does it work straight off an iPhone?
Yes. HEIC is the format an iPhone camera produces and the reading step handles it without conversion, alongside JPG, PNG, and WebP. Keep images under 20 MB, which is the ceiling for reading words off an image.
Can it add context the card does not have?
The AI agents in the app carry web search among their 34 built-in tools, so an agent can add a short company description for context. Keep extraction and enrichment separate so you always know which values came off the card.
How do I stop duplicates from a recurring event?
Add a check on email and company before writing the row, and mark a repeat as a returning contact with the new note appended rather than creating a second record.
Does the follow-up task really fire?
It does when you wire the automation. A contact created today produces a dated task two days out, and the draft message references your note so writing it takes seconds.
Where do the card images live?
Attached to the contact row and in your workspace Media tab. The photo is the receipt for every field the record claims.
What happens to cards from an event we already attended?
Photograph them now and set the event field to the event they came from. The follow-up will be late, which is honest, and the agent can draft a message that acknowledges the gap rather than pretending it did not happen.
