VCF/vCard

VCF is the standard extension for data in vCard format. Most address book or contact manager applications support importing contacts via the VCF format, so providing profile data in this format allows you to import directly into your desktop (or web-based) applications.

Base Request

Making a VCF request is likely to follow these steps (assuming you have an email address already):

  1. Create a valid email hash
  2. Build the URL to request a profile page
  3. Append .vcf to that URL to indicate that you want the results in vCard format

Once you have done the above, you should end up with a URL that looks something like this:

https://www.gravatar.com/205e460b479e2e5b48aec07710c08d50.vcf

When you request that URL (you can do it in your browser) you should get a vCard that most address book/contacts systems can read in. Because the vCard format isn’t as flexible as some others, not all data is included in this format.

Request Options

The VCF data format does not support any additional options

Example

Requesting the above URL in your browser should prompt you to download/import the associated contact information if you have an application installed which is capable of working with it.

Tips

  1. Not all information is included in vCard output because the format does not support easy ways of indicating certain types of data.
  2. As with all profile data formats, profile requests will only resolve for the hash of the primary address on an account. Users may have multiple addresses on a single account, so while a Gravatar image request may return a result, a profile request for the same hash may not.

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