vcard importing

Hi ddSharpe,

Thanks for opening the discussion. Currently I am also facing the same problem.

I have around 568 contacts combined in one vcf file. When I add it through icloud, it fails stating "Could Not Import Some Contacts. 568 contacts could not be imported because there was a problem reading the vcards."

Now I got this vcard file from Samsung Kies from where I exported all of these contacts. I suspect I am suffereing with the same issue where my vcf files are of 2.1 version and Icloud takes only 3.1

2nd thing I tried was email this 1 vcf(contains all 568 contacts) file to my email and while downloading add it to contacts. But I guess there is an issue with that. IPhone is reading only 178 contacts oout of 568.

Now I am stuck. Can you guide me a way out to import all of my contacts into my Iphone5.

Many thanks to those who replied/posted to this issue as it helped me overcome similar problem in July 2017, with Outlook (Office 2013) running on a Windows7.

The procedure I followed was

• In Outlook, select People view
  
• Select about 100 contacts, and right click "Forward"
• A new email will be created with 100 vCard attachments (if you select more than 100 contacts, Outlook may hang while processing the vfc files).
• In this new email, Select All (Ctrl-A) the "vcf" files in the "Attached" box below the Subject line. Drag/drop them to a empty "VCF" folder on your desktop.
• Quit/discard the email.
• Repeat for the next 100 contacts until all contacts have been saved as vcf files.
• Select right-click the VCF folder on your desktop and select "Open command window here"
  
• In the command terminal window, enter the following command:
  c:> copy /a *.vcf merged.txt
  A "merged.txt" file containing all your contents will be created.
• Double click the VCF folder on your desktop, find "merged.txt", and open it with Notepad
• Use the Edit > Replace dialog to replace all "VERSION:2.1" with "VERSION:3.1"
• Use the Edit > Replace dialog to replace all "TEL;" with "TEL;TYPE="
• Save the file
• Browse to www.icloud.com/#contacts
• Using admin menu (Cog wheel in bottom left), click "Import vCard ..." and select your "merged.txt" file.
• DONE - all your contacts should now be in iCloud!

Note that private data will not be exported by Outlook, for example, Notes, Birthdays and Anniversaries. These will need to be manually copied and pasted to iCloud. Suggest you select "List" view in Outlook and add "Notes", etc, to the View settings. This will allow you see at a glance comments in your Outlook contacts.

Hope this is useful!

For some reason, 4 contacts I created on my iPhone did not sync to iCloud. I had to share them as a Text File.vcf to iCloud, save to my PC, open as a contact, export as a vCard, open the vCard in Notepad, change the version to 3.0, save, and then Import into my Contacts.

This was all so I could save my co-workers to a Group in my Contacts since Group management can't be done on an iPhone (yet, 10.3.3) without installing a third-party app.

i m not sure the fault comes to icloud...

you can tell an imac to work with vcard 2.1 and thing are ok with outlook 2007...

looks like you can't tell an ipad to work with vcard 2.1...

so when icloud is syncing from outlook 2007, imac and ipad thing mess up because some cards are in vcard 2.1 and some are in vcard 3.0 format...

with vcard 2.1 categories'field are separated with "; "

with vcard 3.0 categories'field are separated with "," -> outlook 2007 can't recognize that !!

anyone agrees with me ? let me know ?

(sorry for my english, i'm french)

We done a bit of digging here and found you can use a bit of cli kung-fu to change your old VCF version to a new one and then icloud should import ok. Note you may need to extend this command for other fields that might be used in your own file. Replace the old / new vcf files with your own ones.

Here's what we did: taken from my notes here: https://sites.google.com/site/nospices/techstuff#TOC-Importing-older-vCard-conta cts-into-Apple-iCloud

Note: this example was done on a Linux machine, assuming you'll have a similar bash shell in a Mac, or you'll need cygwin in windows.

We had a bunch of files from a HTC phone full of contacts that I was asked to import into iCloud so they could be ported into an iPhone. Unfortuntely it seems iCloud at the time didn't like the format. The error on import wasn't too helpful, so I decided to create a new test contact, export it and compare;

The Format from iCloud, note the later version

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
PRODID:-//Apple Inc.//iOS 5.0//EN
N:;Someone;;;
FN:Some contact
item1.TEL;type=pref:0845123123
item1.X-ABLabel:main
REV:2011-11-07T09:28:43Z
END:VCARD

The format from the HTC phone, seemingly an older version

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
N:Body;Some;;;
FN:Some Body
TEL;CELL;PREF:+447979123456
TEL;CELL:+447979123456
EMAIL;PREF:some@body.uk
END:VCARD

So after a bit of trial and error I used the following commands

sed -e 's/TEL;/TEL;TYPE=/g' -e 's/VERSION:2.1/VERSION:3.0/g' HTC-Phone-April2013.vcf > HTC-Phone-April2013_new.vcf

The format looked like this, and subsequently imported ok :-)

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
N:Body;Some;;;
FN:Some Body
TEL;TYPE=CELL;PREF:+447979123456
TEL;TYPE=CELL:+447979123456
EMAIL;PREF:some@body.uk
END:VCARD

Ok, i know is a bit late to tell you (probably). But for other who's been "stock"- easy way to solve the issue is to import all (you can easily join of all your VCF to one with "copy *.vcf combined.vcf" cmd command)

of your contact to gmail (if you don't have it, create) and from it you can export in "apple" standard.

Easy...

Once you have the 00001.vcf file from your android backups (containing all the contacts), import them into your address book on your Mac. Then once they appear there, select them all and export them. this will now be a version 3 vcf file and will import into iCloud.

If anyone is still facing this problem

http://www.electronmedia.in/wp/fix-vcfvcards-importing-errors-icloud/

This worked for me.

I created a single vcf 2.1 version file with all my contacts in it from my xperia. Imported the vcf file to my desktop. Opened the contacts in notepad and change all the version 2.1 to 3.0 and saved the file.

Don't know the reason behind it but now iCloud successfully imported the vcf file.

Regards

thanks! leading to your comments I have just opened the vcf in Word and replaced the word VERSION:2.1 with VERSION:3.0 and TEL; with TEL;TYPE=

imported the whole package through icloud.com and worked perfectly!

'VCards Backup' was built to help you bulk import VCards to iPhone, check it out at

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vcard-backup/id452726300?mt=8

fareena's suggestion fixed it for me, although i did manually find and replaces in notepad to get mine to work

Thanks, this worked for me.

awesoooooome! Thanks dude