iCal birthdays showing up twice?

Adding my experience here since the last comment in this thread is from 2014. This page from Apple helped me with HALF my problem by using the "Card --> Look for Duplicates" dropdown. Most importantly though for anyone having this problem is the part about how to backup your contacts, just to be safe: If you see duplicate contacts after setting up iCloud Contacts - Apple Support

After doing what it said there, I still had two sets of most of my contacts and two birthdays for every contact still having two sets. This article showed me how to manually fix this by selecting the two I needed merged and then using Shift-Command-L: How to Remove Duplicate Contacts on Your Mac

Easy but a bit time consuming to do manually if you've got a ton of contacts like I do. Hopefully the first article will do the trick for you so you don't need the second one. If not though, the key command to manually merge makes it fairly quick to fix.

Birthdays showing twice since updating to Lion

All birthdays appear twice in ical

Re: I have dual birthdays in ical

why are birthdays showing twice in ical

why do birthdays show up twice in ical

Try this..... open Calendars/Preferences/General and uncheck Show Birthdays calendar. Wait a minute then recheck it and see if the dups go away.

That's odd since all that checkbox does is show birthdays in Calendar. Weird that it would say 'something bad or mistake has happened'.

It sounds like you were/are having the same problem as me. I don't know if you got it worked out, but this is what I did based off a different discussion.

In iCal, birthdays were showing up twice for the same person on the same date. I went to Address Book (because birthdays are linked there and then displayed in iCal). In Address Book, I had two sets of addresses: "On my Mac" and "iCloud." I recently had merged all of my contacts to match up (can't remember how) because under "All Contacts" on my iPhone people were showing up more than once. So, all of my contacts were the same "On my Mac" and on "iCloud." Because my iPhone uses the iCloud contacts, I simply clicked on the first contact under "On my Mac" and pressed Shift and clicked on the last contact to select all of them. (Select all didn't work. I made it select both sets of addresses.) Then I pressed the Delete key and they are all gone.

I went back to iCal and now my contacts show up once. I hope this helps!

Anon M,

same issue here, but solved. In Contacts I had two iCloud accounts, one xxxx@me.com and a recently created xxxx@icloud.com. Contacts were displayed twice, and hence birthdays duplicated in Calendar. By removing one account from Contacts, I now have just one instace per birtday in Calendar.

Hope this helps, Stefano

Anon M wrote:

Thanks for the tipp man, I tried this but unfortunately it didn't work 😟 Plus, when I rechecked it, it gave me a message that a big mistake has happened and some stuff could be lost, but it didn't say why it happened nor it said how to solve it.

Start giving us actual error messages, your paraphrasing them makes it difficult to pin down what is happening, you did not get a message that "a big mistake has happened'

I had this problem, but what was showing up were contact birthdays from my Google Calendar account. I noticed the duplicate entries weren't exactly the same. One had a note about it being the contact's birthday, the other had an alert for the day before the event. That might be why there was two entries, since they are slightly different for some reason. Anyway, I got rid of the dupicates by removing the Google Calendar account. I then switched off the default notification for all day events and closed Cal. I then re-opened Cal, and re-added the Google account. I did not use the account add wizard to also set up contacts, messages, etc. This got my GCal back in Cal, without the duplicate contact birthdays. Not sure if all of those steps were needed, or if they will work for anyone else, but I figured I'd share.

Also, if you have delegates (like I have my wife's Google calendar as a delegate in mine) you might get duplicate birthdays for contacts that you and your delegate have in common.

Click the Calendars button at the top of the calendar window or chose Calendars from the Window menu. This shows a list of sources for the holidays, birthdays, etc. I unchecked US Holidays under "Other" - it's still checked under "iCloud" - and my duplicate holidays went away.

Thank-you. The birthdays etc on my calendar were duplicating up to 20 + times, leaving no room for other items. Now there is only one copy of each. Yeah!!