Issue: My Contacts (Mountain Lion OS, MacBook Pro 2009) have many listed as "No Name" in the Contacts book.
- I would like to Mass Delete all "No Name" lableled Contacts, yet I have not found online here just how to do that.
- I seriously don't want to hand-delete like 1,500 contacts, that is silly.
~ Anyway, anything you can help with is appreciated. Thanks, SanibelMan / date 09-23-12 @ 6:46pm ET Indiana, USA.
MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.1)
Are you on the icloud? Are these contacts showing on an iOS device or at icloud.com?
There is no "mass delete all no name" so that's out of the question.
I am Online on my MacBook Pro,
I believe I am in "All Contacts" on my Mac, which I think includes Contacts on "iCloud" & "On My Mac".
Looks like this in Contacts:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
All Contacts
On My Mac
iCloud
SmartGroups
~~~ SanibelMan @ 7:25pm ET Indiana USA
So are all of these empty contacts on icloud.com or just on the computer?
How many "real" contacts do you have?
(1) The "No Name" Contacts are all on iCloud, not on my Mac.
(2)..........number of Contacts I have:
2,064 Contacts in my iCloud
200+ Contacts on Mac
When you say "icloud" do you mean icloud.com or "icloud" third on the left side inside of the application contacts?
If the latter is true, select the icloud contacts, (now you should see just "no name" contacts. Select one, and hit CMD+A. They should all get selected. Then you can delete them.
Make sure you have a back up of your contacts prior to doing this. Either on an iOS device or exported as vcards to your desktop.
Thanks boisebimmer!
I did the CMD+A to mass select "no name" Contacts. Then hit delete, I think I deleted about 105 I think.
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You Wrote: 'If the latter is true, select the icloud contacts, (now you should see just "no name" contacts. Select one, and hit CMD+A. They should all get selected. Then you can delete them.'
I say: 'That solved the problem, I appreciate your help! SanibelMan @ 8:11pm ET Indiana USA.'
Of course! I'm glad I could help.
Back Again.
Didn't Quite Work. Re:Opened Case~ Need to Mass Delete an Entire Section of Contacts.
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I have found that the Contacts I need to delete are listed under the "#" symbol in contacts.
There are about 2000 I am guessing, if I hit CMD+A, I simply delete the entire Mac Contact Book.
(Which happened, but luckily I had saved a Copy (Exported) to the Desktop, then Imported them back in.)
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So I am open for a New Solution. Anyone?
~Thanks, SanibelMan 09-24-2012 @ 4:03am ET Indiana, USA.
Almost...
Sort them by name, click on the first no name one, click on the last no name one while holding down the shift key, then press delete.
Solved, it took a while, but I deleted all the Unnecessary Contacts. Thanks for your Help!
I had the same problem -- 400 valid contacts, 3,500 'No Name'. During the deletion phase Contacts.app used 25GB of virtual memory -- locking up my desktop. That's a bug.
I wrote up a recommended procedure for doing this when multiple machines sync to iCloud:
http://tech.kateva.org/2013/01/removing-3500-icloud-contacts-with-no.html
I have just had a customer with the same problem on a massive scale. 4k real contacts and 225k 'No Name' contacts which prevented Contacts.app from starting - or at least being usable.
After some messing around I managed to get everything back with the following:
Take a backup of the entire /User/username/Library/Application Support/AddressBook folder - if the following procedure doesnt work you can just copy this back afterwards
Close the contacts app and do a restart (there are other processes that continue to run and create more No Name contacts once the app has been started once). Once restarted do not open Contacts.
Run terminal and type:
cd /User/username/Library/Application Support/AddressBook (replace username)
rm AddressBook-v22.abcddb (this filename may be different on the various flavours of MacOS - type ls -l to find the correct name)
cd MetaData
Once in this folder you will see a file per contact. In my case the files were exactly 752 bytes long (an empty contact - you MAY find your file size differs). Using the following command you can remove all files of this size from the directory:
find ./ -size 752c -print0 |xargs -0 rm
WARNING - Be careful with the above and make sure you are in the MetaData directory before running it!
For 225k contacts this took around an hour to run on an i7. Once completed you will get the prompt to type another command. You can now reopen Contacts. It may take a while to rebuild the database but everything should be back without the No Name contacts.
Hope this helps someone
Contacts with "No Name" need a mass delete
