vCard Profile Photo: What Clear vCard Does to Your Picture
Before a picture goes into a contact file, Clear vCard shrinks and converts it. Here is exactly what happens to size, format, transparency and rotation, from 15 test images.
Short answer: Clear vCard scales a profile photo so its longest side is 300 pixels, keeps the proportions, and saves it as a JPEG at quality 0.82. Transparent areas become white. A photo is never cropped or enlarged, and it is not included in the QR code. Files over 30 MB are refused, and so are file types the tool does not recognise, such as SVG and TIFF.
What We Tested
On October 27, 2026 we uploaded 15 test images to the live tool in a headless Chrome browser, downloaded the .vcf file for each, and examined the photo inside it. We also read the tool’s code to confirm every rule below. The images were made for the test: portraits, landscapes, a transparent PNG, a rotated JPEG, a 12,000-pixel PNG and several formats. Because they are simple pictures, they compress far better than a real camera photo, so the file sizes we give are small. We did not measure real photos.
What the Tool Does to the Picture
| Rule | What we found |
|---|---|
| Size | The longest side is reduced to 300 px. A 4000×3000 image became 300×225; a 3000×4000 image became 225×300 |
| Proportions | Kept. The photo is never cropped to a square: a 200×800 image came out at 75×300 |
| Small images | Never enlarged. A 100×100 image stayed 100×100 |
| Format | Always JPEG, quality 0.82 (we measured 82 from the file’s quantization tables), whatever you upload |
| Transparency | Becomes solid white: the corner of a transparent PNG measured 255, 255, 255 |
| Extra data | None. The saved JPEG has no EXIF block |
The tool paints a white background before it draws your picture. That is why a transparent logo comes out on white.
Rotation
A phone photo is often stored sideways with a flag that says how to turn it. We made a JPEG with that flag set to a quarter turn. The saved photo was upright, 225×300, with our red marker at the top left. The tool has no rotation code of its own: the browser applies the flag when it reads the image. We ran the test only in Chrome, so we cannot say the same for Safari or Firefox.
Which Files Are Accepted
- Accepted: PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, BMP and AVIF. The tool recognises them by the first bytes of the file, not by the name.
- Rejected: SVG, TIFF, and a text file renamed to photo.jpg. Each showed “That file isn’t a supported image.”
- Too large: a file of about 32 MB was refused with “That image is too large. Please choose a file under 30 MB.” The limit is 30 MiB, and the check happens before the file is read.
- Animated GIF: only the first frame is kept. Our two-frame test GIF came out as its first, red frame.
- Huge images: a 12,000×12,000 PNG (445 KB on disk) worked in under a second. Very large images are processed in a background thread so the page does not freeze.
What Ends Up in the File
The photo is stored in the .vcf as one line starting PHOTO;ENCODING=b;TYPE=JPEG:, followed by the image as Base64 text. That is the form the vCard 3.0 standard (RFC 2426) describes for an inline image, and the standard sets no size limit for it. Because the picture is long, the line is split every 75 bytes, as the standard recommends, and every line ends with a carriage return and line feed. In all 11 accepted files, putting the lines back together gave back exactly the photo the tool had made.
With our simple test images the whole .vcf file was between 1.5 KB and 10.1 KB. A real camera photo will usually give a larger file than these, so treat those numbers as a floor and not as typical. After you remove the photo with the remove button, the PHOTO line disappears from the next file.
The Card Preview Is Not the File
On the card, the photo is shown in a circle and is cut to fit it. The file itself keeps the whole picture: the 75×300 image looked like a cropped circle on the card, but the .vcf holds all 75×300 pixels. If a face sits at the edge of a tall or wide photo, crop the picture yourself before you upload it.
The QR Code Has No Photo
The QR code carries only the name, job title, company, phone, email and website. We decoded the QR with a photo loaded and it contained no PHOTO field. Our test photos were 1.3 to 9.7 KB of Base64 text, which is a lot to add to a code that has to stay scannable; see QR code character limit for how much fits, and QR code or .vcf file for what each one carries. In the browser, the photo is kept between visits, stored locally, and removed when you press the remove button.
For how the name fields in the same file are built, see how N and FN work.
Clear vCard turns any accepted picture into a small, upright JPEG with a white background, and puts it in the .vcf only, not in the QR code. We did not test how Apple Contacts, Android or Outlook display that photo after import, so check one contact on your own phone before you hand out the file.
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