How to export contacts into separate files?

You would need to export them one at a time.

There isn’t a way to export from contacts as individual items.

It might be possible to create an AppleScript to do that as it has a vCard property for a person. I don’t play around with AppleScript enough to provide a method.

Automator allows you to run a script that creates separate vCards for each Contacts entry.

- Pie Lover

Just to expand on Pie Lover's finely baked answer, here is how you do it in Automator (it's not straightforward with AppleScript as far as I can see).

Launch Contacts and select all the people for whom you want to create a vCard.

Launch Automator, create a new Workflow (File - New the click the Workflow icon) and click Contacts in the Library. First, drag the Get Selected Contacts People action into the workflow area, then drag in Export vCards underneath it.

In the first action, choose Get selected people. In the Export vCards action, choose Export individual vCards, then select an export folder (it defaults to Desktop but it's easy to change or create a new one).

Your setup should look like this:

Click the Run button in the top right of the workflow window, and your vCards will exported:

You can close the workflow without saving unless you have further use of it.

Cheers,

H