How to bulk update contacts on a Mac?

capewhite wrote:

For those who have access to notepad++ running on a VM, I found this a snack to do.

Over the years, I had Office 365/Outlook add these long fields "Note this is read-only" when it wasn't + other outlook fields that were a mile long. Not an issue when you have a small number of contacts, but I had amassed over 1K over the years - so Contacts.app would run like a dog or crash. This was my fix, and I hope it helps someone.

I exported all contacts from Contacts.app on my Mac as VCF.

Opened the file in Notepad++ running in Windows and followed this video to find and delete all those annoying fields that were added on each contact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVfbFe57h2o .

After I'd cleaned up my contacts, I then saved the file (as .vcf)

Went back to Contacts.app on my Mac, selected all contacts (don't worry, you have a back-up from the 1st step) and deleted all

I then did a File/Import and boom - all those annoying outlook fields were gone.

Contacts.app on my Mac and Contacts on my iPhone screams!

BBEdit or any of the other common text editors will work without needing to run Windows. Notepad++ is nice, though.

With BBEdit, the free version should work without need to purchase the advanced features.

I was desperately looking for the tool to edit 14 000 contacts on spreadsheet. I have groups and would like to clean them, edit or add separately hashtags to each group at once, and more.

Don't want to go to google.This is what I came to. Check it out.

1. Create group in Contacts. (as many as you need)
2. Open "Exporter for Contacts 2", open that group and export with all fields (notes as well) as xlsx or CSV.
3. Open saved file with Excel or Numbers, edit, clean, search etc.
4. Save file as CSV when done.
5. Open "Importer for Contacts", It automatically match fields,(You may edit them. I add Hashtag as addition to the note field) and save directly to same to contacts on your Mac.

(to avoid duplicates, before importing cleaned contacts in the same group, I delete contacts in that group.)

I paid for both of those program $20.

Developer is in Germany. https://www.subclassed.com I see almost monthly releases of updates and fixes. Compliments to developer. There is direct connection with developer for support, feedback and suggetions.

He is doing it German way! Bravo!

(I wish Apple would allow to save groups of contacts into xlsx or CSV and allow import it back to contacts. Drawing contacts directly to Numbers doesn't work at all.

Barney-15E wrote:

Instead of giving all your friends information to Google to sell off, you can just export all of them as a V card and use find and replace in a text editor.

Good suggestion... But be careful exporting to vCard... you may lose some of the data.

Make sure before you export, that you click the [ ] include PICS and [ ] include NOTES option (for exporting) in setting first.

ALSO, don't forget to unclick these two after your done, else "sharing" a Contact will mean also sharing the NOTE. Apparently, Apple never considered that exporting and sharing are usually two different things (the first you keep private to yourself, and the latter you share with others), and that sharing your Contact NOTE to others may not be your intention.

For those who have access to notepad++ running on a VM, I found this a snack to do.

Over the years, I had Office 365/Outlook add these long fields "Note this is read-only" when it wasn't + other outlook fields that were a mile long. Not an issue when you have a small number of contacts, but I had amassed over 1K over the years - so Contacts.app would run like a dog or crash. This was my fix, and I hope it helps someone.

I exported all contacts from Contacts.app on my Mac as VCF.

Opened the file in Notepad++ running in Windows and followed this video to find and delete all those annoying fields that were added on each contact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVfbFe57h2o .

After I'd cleaned up my contacts, I then saved the file (as .vcf)

Went back to Contacts.app on my Mac, selected all contacts (don't worry, you have a back-up from the 1st step) and deleted all

I then did a File/Import and boom - all those annoying outlook fields were gone.

Contacts.app on my Mac and Contacts on my iPhone screams!

Jay Yoo wrote:

Doesn’t seem like you have any experience with doing import export via CSV for large data set changes. I have 2500 contacts I need to organize and cull. Using a spreadsheet is the most effective way to do this.

I’ve got a masters degree in database systems and spent 15 years importing cleaning storing retrieving, manipulating analyzing all sorts of data. Since it’s simple, I would dump it to the vCard text file format, and use sed, awk, or some other text editor with regular expressions to do all the editing. Piece of cake.

You can use Automator to dump it to a tab-delimited file, convert the tabs to commas, and open it up in excel or numbers. However, you can’t extract all of the fields. Generally, you can get all that you need or are using.

I still don’t understand what a taxi has to do with any of this.

Barney-15E wrote:

I’ve got a masters degree in database systems and spent 15 years importing cleaning storing retrieving, manipulating analyzing all sorts of data. Since it’s simple, I would dump it to the vCard text file format, and use sed, awk, or some other text editor with regular expressions to do all the editing. Piece of cake.

If I'd ever known that about you, I'd forgotten. Very impressive!

Instead of giving all your friends information to Google to sell off, you can just export all of them as a V card and use find and replace in a text editor.

Tried with an eval version of Bbedit and can confirm that this is definitely possible. Great for users that don't have access to Notepad++ on Windows.

If you're gonna transfer them to Google, and edit, and then transfer back to Apple, it begs the question...

Why not just leave them as Google contacts and be done with it.

What advantage is there to moving them back to Apple Contacts?

(I wish Apple would allow to save groups of contacts into xlsx or CSV and allow import it back to contacts.

You can do that using Automator.

Drawing contacts directly to Numbers doesn't work at all.

If you meant “Dragging,” I’ve never had it not work.

What’s a “cab“ beside something you get rides in.

vCard is a recognized open standard.