Add Contact sharing to Family Sharing

Question

Level 1

28 points

Add Contact sharing to Family Sharing

Now that we can share our calendars with other family members, can Apple add sharing contacts to Family Sharing? Currently, the only way my wife and I can share one contacts list is for her to use my iCloud account. But when she does that, instead of using her own, she can't take advantage of the phone call transfer to iPad or Mac capability of iOS 8 and Yosemite. Why not make Contacts an additional possible sharing function in Family Sharing?

iMac (27-inch Late 2009), OS X Mavericks (10.9)

Posted on Oct 19, 2014 8:29 AM

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Answer 1

Barney-15E

Level 10

123,122 points

Oct 19, 2014 8:38 AM in response to Goody64

Calendar, File menu, Add Account…

Choose iCloud account and put in the other person’s details.

Just leave the desired account parts selected. Clear all the rest.

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Answer 2

May 18, 2015 9:44 AM in response to Barney-15E

That approach does not work well. I do this with my children's contacts. I now have "Mom" showing up 3 different times with completely different content. When my wife calls, my iPhone says "Home and 5 others". It used to show my wife's name.

I would like to have a separate set of Family contacts that I maintain. That way everyone will have only one contact for each Grandma and they will have all their neighbors, schools and emergency contacts managed by me. In fact it would be great if it could be Read-Only.

I have a NAS server that I can setup a cardDAV service on. I may have to resort to doing that. All of this will definitely mess up the Christmas card list...

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Answer 3

Sep 17, 2015 8:10 AM in response to Michael Sciascia

Not with Apple, but you can set up a separate Gmail account for this e.g. <family.surname>@gmail.com.

There you add your mutual contacts, or export / import them from your computer.

Then add this gmail account to your device [Settings => Mail, Contacts Calendars] and switch on the contacts button, to make them visible in Contacts as well.

Then in [Settings => Mail, Contacts Calendars] scroll down to the contacts section and choose as Default Account for contacts that Gmail Account. That way, all new contacts will by default be created in this 'family' Gmail Account.

Your other family members should do the same.

There. You have your shared contacts account.

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