Developer builds OCR bulk business card importer, learns hard lessons about multi-card pages

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A developer built a feature to bulk-register business card data into a CRM by uploading PDFs or images, using OCR and a separate structuring model to extract fields like company name, email, and phone number. The system separates file intake from heavy processing, running OCR and data registration asynchronously in background jobs to avoid request timeouts. The biggest technical challenge encountered was handling scanned pages containing multiple business cards, since standard OCR tools like Google Cloud Vision return character positions but do not logically separate text belonging to different cards. The developer explored rule-based coordinate analysis and AI-based card detection as potential solutions, noting that difficulty scales sharply depending on how cards are arranged on the page. After extensive planning, the developer discovered the product team had always assumed one card per page — making the multi-card problem a non-issue and underlining the importance of clarifying requirements before engineering solutions.

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