How to Family Sync contacts like Family Sync of calendar

currently use FAMILY SHARING for a calendar.

Calendars in the Calendars app work differently to contacts. Calendars can be isolated to a particular activity (medical, sporting, and so on) and work independently. While the Contacts app can have different categories they are only subsets of the whole data. All you can do with them is to export that group as one vCard file. There is also the consideration that calendars and contacts serve different purposes; while family groups benefit in knowing that a family member has entered a lunch engagement with friends in the calendar, they don't also need to have the contact details of the same friends in their own Contacts list. Note also that calendar sharing does not require a family sharing group.

What we want is a means to do the same with contacts.

This can be achieved by setting up another service and syncing that service across family members while at the same time as having your own local Contacts list if required. You can add a new service to Contacts just in the same way as you can with the Mail app. Contacts after all are simply part of an email service. All you need to do is to set up one of these services and agree which of your contacts ought to be in the shared one, and which of them, if any, are better placed in your own device's Contacts app and not shared. Alternatively, on each participating device use only the shared calendar - it's your choice.

You will need to set this up first by creating a new account either with a new iCloud/Apple ID or any other similar service such as Gmail, then populating the Contact list in that service to your requirements. Then add that account to your devices and turn off the switch for each of the services except Contacts:

• On an iPhone or iPad go to Settings > Contacts > Accounts > Add Account
• On a Mac open Contacts, use the menu bar Contacts dropdown, choose Add Account

I really can’t believe this is not one of the most asked for enhancements in IOS

It probably is, but given the nature of the Contacts data I suspect it is unlikely to change. It's worth noting too that I did some research and the same desire was expressed with Windows users and Outlook. The solution offered to them was the same as above.

If this works for you report back with some comments!

When working with precious data such as this make sure you have a backup; your Time Machine backup would do but also a simple export of all of them as a vCard would be desirable (Select 'All Contacts' then File > Export > Export vCard). You can always restore these if you need to and start again.

There will be some work involved, yes, but the least intensive is to export those you wish to locate in the new service and then import them into that service. You will also have to remove them from your current list. To identify them easily create a new list in your application and drag the desired contacts into that. Work from there, and later on you can delete them all from the application from here.

I have read - but never done this myself - that the act of dragging a contacts card in the application from one service to another deletes it from one service and imports it to the other. Behind the scenes the first service deletes it from the server wile the second service imports it to another. Try this with a test contact and see how it goes. It might be the easiest method. This requires that you have set up your (empty) second service in the Contacts app.

Otherwise and to use the long method, once you have your exported cards for moving over sign into your new service on the web; in my example above this would be to sign into your new iCloud account or the Gmail account, then import the file. Navigate to the file on your Mac when prompted to import.

Then delete the same entries from your old Contacts list; connect the new service to the app and they should download into Contacts but in the new service.

Just as a PS - you mentioned that you had lots of notes about the relationships between people in your Contacts. You can add this in a field within the entry by adding the field called Related Name. It won't appear if you simply click the Edit button. Click on the card you want to edit, choose the Card option in the Menu Bar, then Add Field > Related Name.

Then when it's entered you can click on the label for that name and select 'Show' and the existing contact card for that person will pop up (provided it's in your Contacts of course).