Contacts

What it's about

The directory brings together all your family's key contacts – the paediatrician, school, babysitter, caretaker – including opening hours and live status. Instead of fixed categories, you assign tags you define yourself, each with an icon and a colour.

Why it's here

The most important phone numbers usually end up on a note on the fridge, or scattered across three phones. So that everyone in the family can always find the right contact and call them quickly – even when a phone isn't at hand – there's the directory. With live status (“open/closed now”), you save yourself the call that goes nowhere.

How it works

Person or company/place

Above the name sits the contact's photo: the camera icon picks a new picture, the ✕ removes it. Either only takes effect once you save – cancel, and the existing photo stays untouched.

Right at the top of the edit dialogue, the “Type” toggle sets whether the entry is a person or a company/place. For “Company/place”, patchio hides the birthday and emergency contact fields – those only make sense for people (grandma, the babysitter). Tags and the “For (people)” assignment stay available either way, so the sidebar filters keep working the same. New contacts start on “Company/place”, since that's the more common case in the directory.

Contact-person rows

When a contact isn't a single person but an office with several people behind it – the letting agency, the nursery with two staff members – you enter them in the edit dialogue as contact-person rows: name, relationship or role, phone, email, and a note for each row. That way, the letting agency stays one contact with both people in it, instead of two near-identical cards.

Tags instead of fixed types

Every household starts with default tags (People, School, Nursery, Doctors, Places, Authorities, Trades, Other). You can rename these, give them their own icon and colour, create new ones, or delete the ones you don't need. You can assign several tags to a contact – the first one counts as the primary tag and sets the icon on the contact's card.

The sidebar as a filter

The sidebar on the left (desktop), or the horizontal chip bar (mobile), shows all your tags with a count. Tap one to filter the view to that tag. Below that, you'll find two special filters:

Emergency – every entry marked as an emergency contact
Shared – contacts a linked household has shared with you

Search, filter, and sort

The search field at the top filters by name, phone, email, address, and tag labels. The filter button lets you narrow further by several tags at once (as an AND), “mine only”, “shared only”, “has a phone number”, or “has opening hours”. The sort button switches between Name A–Z, Name Z–A, Newest first, and Oldest first. Pinned contacts and emergency contacts always appear at the top.

Pinning

The pin icon appears when you hover over a card (top right). Pinned contacts stay permanently at the top of the list – useful for the paediatrician, the school, or any other contact you need every day.

Directions to the address

If a contact has an address, you'll find the directions icon on the card and in the detail view. Tap it to open the address in your maps app – on Android, in the app picker for every installed navigation app; on iPhone, in Maps; on a computer, in Google Maps in a new tab. You never have to copy or retype the address.

Opening hours and live status

You can add opening hours for each contact – optionally with seasonal validity (say, an ice-cream parlour that's only open March to October). patchio shows you live, on the card, whether the contact is currently open or closed.

Detail view

Tapping a contact card opens an easy-to-read detail view. There, at a glance, you'll see:

Quick actions – call, email, directions in Google Maps, website (each active only when the field is filled in).
Opening hours for the week – Mon–Sun with the current season's hours and live status (open/closed). Today is highlighted.
Birthday countdown – for contacts with a date of birth (instead of opening hours): how many days until their next birthday.
Every detail field as a tappable row, plus the note.

The “Edit” button in the detail view opens the usual edit dialogue.

Quick actions

Every contact card has direct action buttons: call (phone), write an email, open directions in Google Maps, visit the website – each shown only if the contact has that detail.

Shared contacts

Contacts from linked households appear under “All” and “Shared”. You'll see the owner's tags as chips. You can't assign new tags to someone else's contacts – that stays with their household.

School contacts

Classmates, their parents, the class teacher – you manage these contacts in the class list in the school module; they deliberately don't appear here. Each child has their own list there, separate from the family directory; “Add to the family directory” lets you bring across a single school contact if you need to.

Managing tags

“+ Create tag” in the sidebar opens the tag manager. There you can:

Create new tags (a label + an icon from the curated set + a colour)
Rename existing tags, or change their icon or colour
Reorder them with ↑/↓
Delete tags (the assignment is removed from every contact)

Assigning a contact to a person

In a contact's edit dialogue, you'll find the “For (people)” section. There, you'll see every household member as a clickable chip with their avatar. You can select as many people as you like – say, a child's school or a child's paediatrician – and the selection is saved when you save the contact.

The links are then visible at a glance:

On the contact card, small avatars of the assigned people appear (up to 3, then “+N”).
In the detail view, there's a “Linked to” section with each assigned person's avatar and name.

To change a contact's assignment, open the edit dialogue and adjust the selection.

Filtering contacts by person

In the filter sheet (the filter button at the top), there's a “People” section. Choose one or more people to show only contacts assigned to at least one of them – handy when you quickly want to see every contact for one child. The filter badge on the button counts active people filters too.

Importing & exporting contacts (.vcf)

Exporting

You can export contacts as a vCard file (.vcf) at any time, to bring them into other apps (iOS Contacts, Google Contacts, Outlook, and others) or keep them as a backup.

Export all – open the ⋯ menu at the top right of the directory and choose “Export – all”. Every contact your household owns is written to a file. (Contacts shared by other families are deliberately left out – they belong to their own household.)
Export the current filter – filter or search for the contacts you want, then choose “Export – current filter” from the ⋯ menu. Only your own visible contacts are exported.
Export a single contact – open a contact's detail view (tap the card) and select “Export as vCard”. The file contains just that contact.

Tags are written on export as a CATEGORIES field, so compatible apps can bring them in as groups.

Importing

⋯ → Import (.vcf) lets you read in a vCard file. The assistant runs in three steps:

Choose a file – drag the file into the window, or click to open the file browser. Maximum file size: 5 MB.
Preview & selection – every contact found is listed. Each entry shows name, phone, email, birthday, and any tags found (CATEGORIES). A yellow warning triangle means “might already be in the directory” (same name or same phone number). Skipped entries (no name found) are greyed out and won't be imported. You can deselect individual contacts with a checkbox.
Options & import – you can optionally assign a tag to every imported contact straight away. With the “Create missing categories as new tags” checkbox, any CATEGORIES from the vCard that don't match an existing tag are created automatically as new tags.

Notes

Photos aren't imported or exported in this version.
Birthdays without a year (format --MM-DD) are skipped, since patchio needs a complete date. Only birthdays in YYYY-MM-DD format are imported, and these automatically create a calendar series.
The duplicate warning doesn't replace a proper merge – you decide for yourself whether to import a contact anyway.

In practice

You add the paediatrician with surgery hours Mon–Fri 08:00–12:00 and 14:00–17:00, tag them “Doctors” (a stethoscope icon, red), and pin them. When your child comes down with a fever on Wednesday, you open the directory: the paediatrician is right at the top, with a green “open” showing next to it – straight to the call.