How do you remove duplicate contact groups -- I have thousands of them (Answered below)

They appear on iCloud -> contacts

iPhone -> contacts

MacOS -> contacts

They appear to have accumulated over the years, all the same group name of "Work".

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Answer:

I tried deleting the contact groups by hand on iCloud -> contacts:

• For the first one: left-click on the group-name, type the delete key, type return
• This leaves the next group-name selected, type the delete key, type return <-- repeat until tired

they were deleted, it takes about 2-3 seconds per contact

but there were thousands and thousands of them.

So I used "automator" which is built-in Mac tool to automate deleting them (and indeed found there were about 5000 identical contact-groups):

• Get a contacts window
  • Safari -> iCloud.com, login, select "Contacts" and move that window off to the left.
• Run your automator script:
  • start automator (finder -> applications -> automator)
  • create a new automator script
  • move the automator window over to the right, and resize this window and the Safari window so they don't overlap
  • hit the automator "record" red button (automator records the mouse/key sequences you do)
    • mouse to "All Contacts" in the iCloud contacts window
    • left-click on "All Contacts" twice (the first time sets the input focus, the second one selects the group)
    • down-arrow twice to move the selected group down to one you want to delete
    • hit the delete key
    • hit the return key
  • hit the automator "record" button to stop recording
  • hit automator "run" and the script should run and remove a group
  • save the script (as a checkpoint that works)
  • add an automator "loop" to repeatedly run the above script
    • In the automator library menu down the left side of the window click on "Utilities" which should reveal a submenu with "Loop"
    • Drag the Loop into the automator script window under the main script box.
    • Set "Loop automatically", Stop after 5 times, Use the original input
    • Adjust "Playback speed" to about .5x, and the Timeout to "15 seconds".
  • Run your script that now includes a loop (click on run) and watch the fun.
  • if it works fine, restart everything and run it:
    • change the loop count to something large (I used 1000), save the script, exit automator
    • close/exit Safari
    • start automator, and select your saved-script
    • start Safari -> iCloud.com -> contacts
    • hit automator -> run, and come back in a few hours and see how it went.

The automator tool's behavior was a little inconsistent, I had problems when I:

• tried to select the contact group I wanted to delete instead of "All contacts" and arrowing down. I would have expected this to work, sometimes it did, but unfortunately... sometimes it didn't
• did not restart between runs. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it hung
• once it deleted the third contact instead of the third contact-group. I don't know why or how -- maybe I accidentally touched the mouse while the script was running (?,?) but fortunately iCloud contacts keeps a backup of your contacts and you can revert to a prior version.
• I ran the script too fast (hence the adjustment of "Playback speed" and Timeout.

It took about 50 hours of run time over several days to delete all the groups.

Note: the above handles the case where all contact-group names are the same, and you want to delete them all. You'll have to adapt this if that isn't your situation.

Good luck!

June 2021