What is the best file format for personal contacts?

[AshesAndWool]

I want to make a locally stored list of all my friends', and family's  names, emails, phone number, addresses, maybe photo etc. What would be the cleanest, most future-proof way to do this? My first thought was to store each contact as its own docx / odf document (or one long document) for easy compatibility, but after googling for a few minutes I now realise that there are formats like VCF and CSV specifically for this usecase. Has anyone made something similar / have some knowledge of this that they want to share? What are the safest and best formats and programs? Thanks for the time.

[Radium_Angel]

18 minutes ago, AshesAndWool said:

best formats

 

18 minutes ago, AshesAndWool said:

CSV

CSV can be read by *anything*, email-program or not. It's certain a safe format to store data in, because it's very easy to read in plain text.

[Toxiclegend]

100% CSV.

Excel can open it, notepad can open it, literally anything. CSVs are also great if you want to import it some where later.

[AshesAndWool]

27 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

 

CSV can be read by *anything*, email-program or not. It's certain a safe format to store data in, because it's very easy to read in plain text.

Thanks for a clear and great answer, I'm guessing the only thing you're giving up for the uncontested compatibility is the ability to include a photo? (without getting around it by using say, a weblink to a photo)

[Radium_Angel]

3 minutes ago, AshesAndWool said:

Thanks for a clear and great answer, I'm guessing the only thing you're giving up for the uncontested compatibility is the ability to include a photo? (without getting around it by using say, a weblink to a photo)

Correct, CSV is Comma Separated Values. Effectively plain text, that can import easily into anything that can read Commas as a delinator.

 

[LogicalDrm]

15 hours ago, AshesAndWool said:

Thanks for a clear and great answer, I'm guessing the only thing you're giving up for the uncontested compatibility is the ability to include a photo? (without getting around it by using say, a weblink to a photo)

Yeah, CSV is purely for strings and numbers. The pro is that you can open it with any software, maybe only needing to tell which column is which. Con is that it only stores pure text.

 

VCF or vCard might store photos and other more rich info, but since photos are either stored locally on device, fetch from server or cloud, storing those long-term is already issue by itself.