How do you find out the size of a contact card?

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Level 1

7 points

How do you find out the size of a contact card?

The old Mobile Me service had lots of issues with the number of contacts you could have. Now it seems that with this info: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4489

iCloud: Limits for Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, and Bookmarks

Apple has tried to inform us about the limits you can have. None the less it does not tell you how to ( for instance) know the size of the memory taken by ( contacts). So they have given us guidance but no way to know how to use it or check it. Can anybody advice how to measure the size of contacts ( for instance).? For business users this could be important. Thanks in advance for any assistance. Guy M.

Posted on Sep 6, 2012 12:04 AM

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Answer 1

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Roger Wilmut1

Level 10

131,188 points

Sep 6, 2012 1:48 AM in response to BAGBOY1

Either in Address Book on a Mac or at http://icloud.com you can export contacts as a vCard. If you select all and export, then do a Get Info on the resultant file, it will tell you the overall size. If you export an individual contact you can similarly get the size of that.

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Answer 2

BAGBOY1 Author

Level 1

7 points

Sep 6, 2012 1:51 AM in response to Roger Wilmut1

Hmm most interesting, thank you. Seems one will end up making rather a lot of exported files in the process but I can see that will work. I wonder if there is a way of interrogating the database to identify any problem contacts that might take up more than the standard amount of space? Best Regards, Guy M.

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Answer 3

Sep 6, 2012 2:25 AM in response to BAGBOY1

Address Book's own database will be differently structured from an exported vCard so it's not really worth tampering with that.

The vCard is a series of fields separated by line returnes, with records being separated by BEING:VCARD and END:VCARD - a typical single simple card looks like this:

BEGIN:VCARD

VERSION:3.0

N:National Film Theatre;;;;

FN:National Film Theatre

ORG:National Film Theatre;

TEL;type=WORK;type=pref:020 7928 3232 booking

TEL;type=WORK:020 7928 3535 prog planning

TEL;type=WORK:020 7815 1335 tech

TEL;type=WORK:020 7928 3233 booking

item1.ADR;type=WORK;type=pref:;;The Box Office\, BFI Southbank\nBelvedere Road\nSouth Bank;London;;SE1 8XT;

item1.X-ABADR:gb

X-ABUID:A1345405-E248-4B2B-906B-F5AFA5BF15CB\:ABPerson

END:VCARD

As you can see it's only a small amount of data - 464 bytes - so really I don't think you need to worry about the size of any individual entry except where photos are concerned - obviously they take up a lot more room. I checked a card with a typical small photo and the size was 5,137 bytes: so only quite a large photo is going to cause you any problems.

I don't know of any way of collecting statistics on the all-contacts vCard, except that if you converted it to a tab-delimited format and imported it into a spreadsheet or database program it would tell you the number of contacts.

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