Cannot edit or delete in Mountain Lion Contacts

Thank you Seonie!!!

Just so you all know, I have been battling this since way before iCloud. I had pulled all of my contacts from Gmail a long time ago. Over a year ago, I used Migration Assistant to move everything to a new MacBook Pro. I always assumed something went wrong in there because since then I haven't been able to delete any contacts or groups. Even if I had just created them seconds ago. iCloud helped because I could finally delete some. However, "On My Mac" became my default and everything I put in there was permanent.

I couldn't see the AddressBook folder in Finder, but was able to delete from Terminal. Thanks again Seonie.

Hi,

I worked this one out! You could delete or modify your contact from icloud. Meaning, you should open it from browser. Click on the contact you want to modify and after that, click the "gear" on the left below. By then, you'll see the option to modify or even delete it.

Hope this will help! 😀

t_shirt wrote:

You could delete or modify your contact from icloud.

Good find!

Too bad they don't have it set up that way on Mountain Lion.

I know this is an old topic, but I had the same issue, unable to delete groups in "On my mac", and found that I had created smart groups that depended on them.

Before deleting the groups you have to delete any smart groups that are dependent on them. This solved the problem for me.

Am using Mountain Lion. And I've edited some contacts from icloud.com. It got automaticaly synced to all my Apple gadgets

I am unable to delete contacts in ML 10.8.2 and have tried all in threads including Troubleshooting iCloud. I do not have an Addres Book file in my application support to delete and then autopopulate, a gear does not show up when highlighting a contact to allow me to choose Delete (should add that simple highlighting and pressing delete does not work and Delete under Edit is gray.) iCloud acount is checked in preference accounts. Thank you

im on ML 10.8.2 as well

this is what i did to clean out my contacts.

open Contacts

Click on the Groups under ALL on My Mac

this will cause it to highight in BLUE

then just press the delete key of your keyboard.

I cleared about 10 groups with this ,

leaving only my clean contact list which i imported to icloud from my google contacts using an export

in the google site and import into the icloud.

Hope this helps, it worked for me ,

now no more duplicate contacts! c",)

This is crazy ??? How come apple has not said any thing here ..... I also can not edit my contacts and this has been gooing on a long time since I upgraded to ML.

I can not delete or edit any of my contacts within the address book or contacts application on the Mac. I have tried everything everyone has said up here and way more. I can edit things with terminal and edit Kext and plist. so I realized I know it am doing. I just have not found the correct Avenue as of yet. It seems for whatever reason there is read only turn on somewhere in this application or its connected files.

I cannot find any trace of this read only element and had edited much of my operating system.

If I log into iCloud.com, I can add contacts, add photos to existing contacts, remove information from existing contacts but I cannot do this on my Mac. I am running the latest version of Mountain lion. when I edit things on iCloud, they show up almost instantaneously on my phone and on the contacts app on the Mac when the program is already open. So there's no communication issues there.

I really hope someone smarter than me can figure this out.

I'm going to see if I'm having the same problem on my MacBook, and if I am going to scream. But the point is not the MacBook but to use my desk with my Mac Pro.....

just to add a note, I tried removing iCloud from everything and just syncing contacts to iPhone, iPhone to computer. That not only crash iTunes sort of, but did not work. From what I can tell there is about five different checkboxes in various places that you have to turn off iCloud and turn on Contact syncing from computer to iPhone or iPhone to computer.

If I click all contacts On My Mac it does highlight but agai it will not delete. Does anyone have a suggestion? Please?

This contacts problem had been driving me crazy for months, so it was finally time to look for a fix...

The Library folder is hidden, so make sure you enable hidden folders.

Also, just to be clear, there are two Library/Application Support/ folders. One is at the top root level and the other is at your user name level. You want the latter one.

The above solution worked for me, so thank you Seonie! 🙂

Thank you. I found Application Support and threw out my Address Book but...it has not auto populated after 10 min. I can plug into iTunes I believe to sync to iCloud (yes?) but why did it not work?

Yes, same thing happened to me actually.

Under Contacts > Preferences > Accounts

You probably need to add your iCloud account again (it was somehow deleted). After adding it, the contacts immediately showed up.

Success!!! On all fronts. Thanks so much!

Excellent! Thanks for the help Seonie.

Just what I was looking for. Thanks!