what's the best way to merge contact cards in Contacts

P. Phillips wrote:

As suggested, Merge the Duplicates - some on My Mac and balance on iCloud. Now ALL the Contacts both on My Mac and iCloud should be reading the same information - No ??

No. It doesn't compare between what's On My Mac and what's in iCloud. It only looks for duplicates within either list.

Just to be sure I understand how it worked, I tried your suggestion to Merge Contacts and the result was exactly what I expected. To use that command, you first have to select a contact list. Then you click on Look For Duplicates. The Contacts User Guide says:

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.

For example, it found that I had two cards for John Jones with different information. When you select Merge Duplicates, It merged the two cards into one card for John Jones. Then, there were two cards for Sam Smith. Same action again; two cards became one card. That's what merging duplicates is supposed to do, but that's no help for me.

In Contacts, there are two separate lists of contaccts--On My Mac and iCloud. It totally matters which list you're in when you add a new contact. If you are in the On My Mac list and add a new contact, it WILL NOT be saved in iCloud and therefore will not be in the Contacts app on my iOS devices. Vice versa if you're in the iCloud list when you add a new contact.

My problem, which I'm struggling to explain to you, is that there are some new contacts that were created On My Mac and are then NOT saved in iCloud. I need to find those contacts that are saved On My Mac and NOT in iCloud and copy them to iCloud, but I don't know if that's even possible to do.

I don't believe this will do what I'm needing. All this will do is take two cards for the same contact and combine them into one card. I want to find all the contacts that exist ONLY in On My Mac and copy them into the iCloud list. After doing that, the two contact lists will be the same, which they aren't now. I've accidentally created new contacts that are only On My Mac and they're not accessible from my phone. That creates a problem I'd like to solve.

I am logged in to the same Apple ID on all my devices and Contacts is enabled on all iOS devices.

On my desktop in Contacts, I can choose where to create a new contact--On My Mac or iCloud. I've learned now that if I select On My Mac, then the new contact's information is saved only on the desktop and not in iCloud. I've mistakenly done that a few times, but I don't know which ones or how many were created that way. None of those contacts are listed in the Contacts app on my iOS devices.