Contacts

I have gone through this mess in the past. I have had work and personal contacts all mixed to the tune of about 5000 contacts and the number was mostly bloated by duplicates. I found it easier to correct this using my MacBook Pro and iCloud with contacts. The advantage that you have is that you have a MacBook and the contacts are on there as well.

The Prep Work-

• Turned ON contacts in iCloud for the iPhone and the MacBook Pro (and the iPad and other devices). You may already be using contacts with synching to iCloud option.
• Moved all the contacts to iCloud that were not in iCloud from all Devices. Used the standard drag and drop method on the MacBook Pro within the Contacts app.
• There was also some trickery involved here because I had some work contacts on a windows computer and I had to export them from windows and then imported into the contacts on my MacBook Pro.
• Below is the image of how my contacts look like in the contacts app. ALL contacts are now in iCloud-

• As mentioned above, I had tons of duplicates and I had to address that from my MacBook Pro as well.
• While in the Contacts app on my MacBook Pro, I had the app take out and merge all the duplicates as shown in the image below.

• Since the contacts were all on iCloud and now the duplicates were cleaned up, they synced across all my devices via iCloud and the list is now clean and 5 times smaller.

Should you try the approach above then ensure that you have a backup of your contacts created on your MacBook Pro in the event that things get out of hand and you lose some data.

Good Luck,

Axel F.

I took a different approach, being an Excel fan.

If you have a Mac you can use a paid-for app like AB Export to export everything in your Mac Contacts to a .csv file which you can save as excel to avoid the data and format loss in the warning.

You can use all the usual manipulations, sorting by various columns to eliminate duplicates, and even moving stuff to the correct columns as they get messed up over the years. This is particularly so if you moved betrween Apple, Microsoft and Android n your murky past.

Once happy, save as .csv and re-import into icloud contacts.

Hi Peter,

I was fortunate that I use MS Outlook for my office work and those contacts can be directly exported to a .CSV file from Outlook. Then you can manipulate it in Excel and import back into Contacts on the MacBook Pro.

Note that my response to the OP has no mention of .CSV files since my assumption in the response was that only Apple devices and apps are in play.

Axel F.

Agreed. It was just another option.

I only use Apple devices and apps like AB Export from App Store. I too use Outlook for contacts but registered as Exchange accounts with Contacts toggled on. That means contacts appear both in Outlook and in Contacts app, so that your method and my method are equally viable.

Excel (or LibreOffice) I count as standard tools! No idea if Numbers will process .csv files, which have been around for 40 years at least, but I still regard Numbers and the rest of the "suite" as a failed experiment.

The duplicates in this instance are a result of poor synchronisation (otherwise they would not duplicate) and it is essential that the OP gets that straight before reworking the contacts data. All devices must be shown to replicate new contacts in all other devices.

If all your devices were sync'd correctly then all the changes you just made on the phone would replicate to all devices.

As I said earlier this is possibly not currently the case or you would not have had the mess in the first place

Remember my remark..

"...it is essential that the OP gets that [sync] straight *before* reworking the contacts data..."

There is no guarantee now that your hard work is not overwritten so try to back it up somehow