Contacts - Link vs Merge

Question

Level 1

87 points

Contacts - Link vs Merge

This has been asked in the past, but I couldn't find a good answer. I did some digging and found the following.

LINK Contacts:

... you may have multiple cards for a contact—for example, one card from your Yahoo account and one from your Google account. You can link the cards to streamline your list of contacts. The card for each account remains, but Contacts shows just one card with the combined information.

MERGE Contacts:

If you have more than one card for a contact in an account, you can merge the cards. Merging cards combines the cards and keeps all the unique information in a single card.

References:

https://support.apple.com/guide/contacts/link-contacts-from-different-accounts-adrb33f38d93/13.0/mac/11.0

https://support.apple.com/guide/contacts/merge-contact-cards-adrbk1456/mac

Hope this is helpful.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.12

Posted on Mar 8, 2021 10:20 AM

Reply

Answer 1

cwebber1 Author

Level 1

87 points

Mar 8, 2021 11:15 AM in response to cwebber1

So, merging seems to be the simplest solution (in that keeping duplicates is harder to manage). And there is a mechanism for doing so. Here's the problem.

On my Mac, I go to the Menu->Card->LookForDuplicates...

The application tells me it found 22 duplicates and asks me if I want to merge (all of them).

But what if I only want to Merge some of them. Or what if I want to see which cards Apple thinks I should merge. What if there are two people with the same name?

Like many high-powered commands, they work in the background and don't give the user any confidence that the results will be as expected.

Reply

Contacts - Link vs Merge

Similar questions