What are effective ways to merge duplicate Contacts in iOS? I have thousands of contact duplicated and in mosta cases there are several dozen identical entries.

After updating to macOS 10.12.4, and some iCloud reconnections that I do not comprehend, I ended up with three of every contact. I ran the Look for Duplicates exercise, but it didn't work. I deleted the contacts from my phone as instructed, ran the Look for Duplicates search, and eliminated 300+, then again to eliminate another 3. That left all my contacts merely duplicated.

So, I thought maybe the iPad is the problem, and repeated the iCould turn-off and contact deletion. But, I still have duplicate everything on my iMac.

When I reconnected the iPhone and iPad, the contacts all reappeared, singly, on both devices. However, I have two each remaining on the iMac.

Any other suggestions?

Thank you, sir, for your suggestion. But, it doesn't work...tried a whole bunch of times. Guess I'll try to delete one (one that I no longer recognize) to see what happens. If that works, and doesn't delete the contact from my phone, I'll do it manually.

BTW, I cannot sign in to messages on my iMac now. I see other folks have that problem, too.

There are over a billion iPhones in use, and probably several billion Apple customers of other products. No matter what problem you have, someone else has it also. But you only hear from the ones with the problem. A billion users don't post "I have no problems with the latest version." Only the people with problems post.

I have no trouble signing in to messages on my MBP, my MBA, or my wife's iMac.

I had this problem and tried the look for duplicates, sign in/out of iCloud, FaceTime, iMessage etc. And all failed.

The solution I chanced upon seemed to be in iCloud settings - the toggle for contacts in iCloud storage must be set either on or off but the SAME for ALL devices using the account.

The problem didn't arise for me until I got a MBA for work, from memory I left everything pretty much out of the crate, and only noticed a problem after an iOS update together with OS Sierra on my iMac: I'd left the 'book running El Cap with different iCloud setting, so a quick update and switch of settings seemed to do the trick. I'm not actually convinced the macs need to run the same OS, just that these hitches always seem to appear after updates.

Incidentally, I set all off first, then all on again a little while thereafter. Problem went away without needing to merge.

Hope this helps, it worked for me.

You would want to do this on your computer...not on a small, less featured device such as a phone.

Open the Contacts app in iOS OS X. On the Card menu choose Look for duplicates.

One thing to try is to rerun the duplicate check several times, until it no longer finds any. I had to do that a few months ago, with only 1500 contacts. There were 3rd party applications that I recall, but I haven't used any recently. I just googled "dedupe mac contacts" and found several, both for iOS and Mac. One in particular looked for multiple duplicated fields, such as phone numbers and addresses.

This doesn't help me, for squat. I have, possibly, thousands of "No Name" contacts in my phone, and I want to get rid of them all at once. It's effecting my memory, and I refuse to delete them one-by-one. I don't have a Mac, and don't intend on getting one. So, how do I remedy this, without throwing the phone at the phone company I bought it from?

I wasn't answering you, and based on your attitude I'm not going to.

The only way in which I was able to solve "duplicate contacts" forever, was using the iCloud to save them all; and delete them from anywhere else.

I had this particular nightmare after upgrading to iOS 10 and mac OS Sierra, along with other well-documented problems... I found the duplicates refused to disappear even after running the find duplicates feature in the contacts app on my mac and at first thought it was because I'm running an external SSD for the OS firmware. However, all the libraries are pointing in the right direction etc. etc. but found (i.e. got it from someone else) this rather inelegant solution, whilst not signing out of iCloud. Ensure devices have good internet connection:

Turn off contacts in iCloud in Settings on iPhone, when prompted delete contacts on iPhone (at least I did, probably accidentally).

In MacOS look for duplicates in the card tab whilst in-App and merge them - there were over a thousand found on mine but one sweep took care of it but do this on every OSX/MacOS device; I use a MBA as well as iMac and this didn't work at all until done on both computers. Yeah, I know, " all devices should be connected to the internet and "...

Turn on contacts in iCloud settings on iPhone.

Wait a minute or two, as if by magic contacts reappear in the app, call log, messages etc.

Incidentally, on the iPhone I had Contacts found in Apps turned off in Contacts settings, not sure if this makes a difference but I performed this procedure again before posting just to check it wasn't a fluke.

Hope that helps, although most likely it's all figured out now.

This works!

Rerun Look for Duplicates several times. Seriously.

I have this problem too. Tried duplicates from card menu but it doesn't help.