Import and export (vCard)

Bring your contacts into myrna and take them out again using vCard, the standard contact card format (.vcf). A single file can hold many contacts at once, so you can move an entire address book in one step. Both actions live in the command palette: press Ctrl+K (Cmd+K on Mac) and run Import (vCard) or Export (vCard). This page shows how each works, which fields travel along, and how duplicates are handled.

Where the commands live

Import and export are commands in the command palette rather than buttons in the Contacts header. Press Ctrl+K (Cmd+K on Mac) from anywhere in the app and type "vcard" to find them:

Import (vCard): Opens a file chooser for a .vcf file and adds its contacts to your list.
Export (vCard): Generates a .vcf file with every contact and downloads it.

Import from vCard

Importing reads a .vcf file and adds its contacts to your list. One file can contain a single card or hundreds of them, and all of them are imported in the same pass.

1In your source app (phone, email, Google Contacts, Apple Contacts, etc.), export the contacts as a vCard (.vcf) file.
2Press Ctrl+K and run Import (vCard).
3Pick the .vcf file in the file chooser.
4The contacts are added to your list and the app switches to the Contacts module, with a message reporting how many were imported, how many were merged, and how many were skipped for not having enough data.

You do not need one file per person. A .vcf that holds many cards imports every contact at once — ideal for moving a whole address book in a single step.

The following fields are read from each card when present:

Name: Taken from the card's formatted name (FN).
Nickname: Read from the NICKNAME field.
Emails and phones: Every email and phone on the card is imported, keeping its label (such as home, work, or mobile).
Company and department: Read from the organization field (ORG); the second part becomes the department.
Role: Taken from the TITLE field.
Website: Read from the URL field.
Social profiles: Read from social-profile entries (X-SOCIALPROFILE), keeping the platform.
Addresses: Every address (ADR) is imported with its label, street, city, state, postal code, and country.
Birthday and dates: The birthday (BDAY) — with or without a year — and any other saved dates are imported.
Tags: Read from the categories field (CATEGORIES) as separate tags.
Notes and photo: The free-text note (NOTE) and the avatar photo, when provided as a link, are imported.

Cards exported from an iPhone are understood too, including grouped fields (item1.EMAIL) and encoded (quoted-printable) text, so accents and special characters come through correctly.

The vCard CATEGORIES field maps to myrna tags, not to the colored categories of the sidebar — those are a separate concept you assign inside the app.

How duplicates are handled

Importing never creates a second copy of someone you already have. When an incoming card shares an email or phone with an existing contact, the two are merged: the existing contact is kept and any new details from the file are added to it. Cards with no match are created as new contacts, and cards with no usable data at all (no name, email, or phone) are skipped and counted in the report.

This means you can re-import the same file safely: matching contacts are updated in place instead of piling up duplicates.

Export to vCard

Exporting writes all of your contacts to a single vCard 3.0 file that downloads to your device. It is the simplest way to back them up or carry them to another app.

1Press Ctrl+K to open the command palette.
2Run Export (vCard).
3A vCard file named contatos.vcf is generated with every contact and downloaded.
4Keep that file as a backup, or import it into another device or service.

Export always includes your whole list, so the file is a complete snapshot of your contacts at that moment. Multi-value fields keep their labels, tags are written as CATEGORIES, and the photo travels as a link.

vCard is a universal format: the files you export open in phones, Google Contacts, Apple Contacts, and most email apps, and files from those apps import back into myrna. That makes it the recommended way to back up and to migrate contacts between devices and services. To review a contact after importing, see the "Add and edit" page.