Sync iCloud to Mac's Address Book

Re: Contacts from Address Book (iCloud) not populating iCloud.com - In my case I could get some in a group to sync with iCloud, but not all. After a lot of rooting around and testing I think I've got it working reliably. Takes a couple of steps. Here's what I did:

In Outlook Select contacts desired, in my case by group so I could drop them in my Address Book/iCloud groups.

Forward all the contacts as vCard - Right Click and it will an open e-mail with all the contacts as .vcf cards.

With the e-mail open - from the main menu - select Draft/Attachments/Save All - To a folder of your choice (I name the folders by the Group I selected)

Open Address Book

Drag all the .vcf files to "On My Mac" (not the iCloud groups directly.)

Once they're in On My Mac (Where they're only stored locally on that computer) drag them from On My Mac to the Group Desired

A little clunky, but at least it works. Been going nuts over this for several days. Tried everyone else's ideas but no luck. If I tried dragging the .vcf files directly to a group - all would be in the group, but not all would sync to iCloud. Couldn't even go back and selective drag the missing ones in.

What I'm still having a problem with - some .vcf files won't drag to Address Book - "No Importable Cards Were Found". Still trying to identify what is different for those cards.

Hope this helps some other poor lost soul....:-)
John

What operating systeem are you using? Please always post this when you have a question as the answer can be different depending on what it is.

You should get Address Book/Contacts syncing when you sign into System Preferences>iCloud and enable Contacts in the checklist there. When you first do this, all your contacts in Address Book should be moved to the iCloud server and read from there by the application. Any contacts listed under 'On My Mac' won't sync to iCloud, but all contacts in iCloud should show as they aren't actually being synced but read off the server.

If you are having trouble with this I would suggest signing out in System Preferences>iCloud and signing back in again - your data will disappear from your Mac when you sign out but will re-appear when you sign back in.

Are you running the latest Lion, 10.7.5? iCloud: System requirements

Also, if you want to import contacts from your iPhone, don't forget to turn on Contacts under Settings > iCloud. Should be obvious, but it took me a few minutes to realize that's why my contacts weren't populating on to my Mac.

My problem is the other way around... I want to have contacts which I create on my mac to upload to icloud and sync to my other devices. It works perfectly when I create contacts on my phone. They sync seamlessly.

I am using outlook for mac. Once I save a contact in outlook it syncs with the addressbook. No problem. Why don't those contacts sync to the cloud? They are in my address book after all... Now I have to save them twice.

Sooo annoying! Please help.

M

Mykl Bart wrote:

My problem is the other way around... I want to have contacts which I create on my mac to upload to icloud and sync to my other devices. It works perfectly when I create contacts on my phone. They sync seamlessly.

I am using outlook for mac.

Outlook for Mac does not support iCloud, you can't do what you want using Outlook.

Csound1 wrote:

Outlook for Mac does not support iCloud, you can't do what you want using Outlook.

I believe you may have misunderstood Mykl Bart's question, which is my question as well. Outlook does not need to directly support iCloud. His Outlook syncs to the Address book "On my Mac" just fine.

But why do the "On my Mac" contacts not sync with iCloud contacts....? They are both in the same Address Book application???

Presently, in my Address book, I have duplicates displayed for every single contact; one for iCloud and one for "On my Mac". What is the best way to manage this, if I want to keep a local copy on my Mac? Is it really one or the other? Is there really no way to keep ONE list and have both sources stay in sync?