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What's the difference between "My Contacts" and "All Contacts"?
I have no other account other then my iCloud account (from what I can tell), but "My Contacts" has a significantly smaller number of contacts then "All Contacts".
What's the difference?
Thanks for posting the screenshots, that's helpful. I didn't realize that you were looking at your groups.
"All Contacts" include (as the name implies) all of your contacts. Below that are any contact groups that you may have defined. These would normally be such things as "Work", "Personal", "Doctors", etc.; any groups that you find useful to define. These contain subsets of the "All Contacts" group.
At some point, perhaps inadvertently, you must have created a group called "My Contacts", or imported it to iCloud from your computer. At the time this may have contained all of your contacts and would have had the same number of contacts as the "All Contacts" group. Then over time you probably added 433 additional contacts that were never part of the original "My Contacts" group, resulting in an "All Contacts" group that contained 1465 contacts.
If you don't have any use for the "My Contacts" group, you can delete it by clicking on it on the left sidebar, click the gear icon on the lower left and choose Delete. If you're concerned about doing this, you can make a backup of this group first by selecting it on the left sidebar, clicking on a single contact within the group, pressing Control-A to select them all (they should all be highlighted), then clicking the gear icon and choosing Export vCard. This will create a .vcf file that can later be imported back to iCloud if you ever need to (by clicking the gear icon again and choosing Import vCard).
Thanks for posting the screenshots, that's helpful. I didn't realize that you were looking at your groups.
"All Contacts" include (as the name implies) all of your contacts. Below that are any contact groups that you may have defined. These would normally be such things as "Work", "Personal", "Doctors", etc.; any groups that you find useful to define. These contain subsets of the "All Contacts" group.
At some point, perhaps inadvertently, you must have created a group called "My Contacts", or imported it to iCloud from your computer. At the time this may have contained all of your contacts and would have had the same number of contacts as the "All Contacts" group. Then over time you probably added 433 additional contacts that were never part of the original "My Contacts" group, resulting in an "All Contacts" group that contained 1465 contacts.
If you don't have any use for the "My Contacts" group, you can delete it by clicking on it on the left sidebar, click the gear icon on the lower left and choose Delete. If you're concerned about doing this, you can make a backup of this group first by selecting it on the left sidebar, clicking on a single contact within the group, pressing Control-A to select them all (they should all be highlighted), then clicking the gear icon and choosing Export vCard. This will create a .vcf file that can later be imported back to iCloud if you ever need to (by clicking the gear icon again and choosing Import vCard).
First, thanks so much for this help.
Let me try the screenshots again. I'll hold off on the merge piece until you see these shots, as I'm pretty sure you're going to know something.
I grabbed new shots that include the total number of records.
Are you sure they don't belong to another account such as On My iPhone (iPad) or From My Mac, etc.? You can check to see if they all belong to your iCloud account by going to Settings>iCloud on your iOS device, turning contacts off, and choosing Delete from My iDevice when prompted (your iCloud contacts will still be in iCloud). Then open your contacts and see if any still appear. If they do, they don't belong to iCloud.
Then go back to Settings>iCloud, turn contacts on again, and choose Merge if prompted. Your iCloud contacts will download back to your device, and any locally stored contacts will be uploaded to iCloud and merged with the contacts already there.
Unfortunately that didn't do the trick. In fact, I can see two lists of Contacts on the web browser portal for iCloud, not dissimilar to the attached iOS screen shot. Any further ideas why "My Contacts" is over 400 contacts lower than "All iCloud"?
I don't see a screenshot in your post.
Are the contact lists different, or is the smaller list a subset of the larger one?
To merge them you can always go to iCloud.com, open one list, select a single contact, press control-A to select them all, then drag and drop them to the other list, then delete the empty group. You may end up with duplicates that you would have to delete when you do this.
Thank you so much. That makes sense, and I'm not sure how I did it - but it's gone now, and I'm happy.
Thanks again!
You're welcome.
What's the difference between "My Contacts" and "All Contacts"?
