iCloud Contacts failing to sync after High Sierra

Dave is correct. These are one time fixes. It will work once and then reverts back to not syncing. I did some more testing yesterday and found that if you change anything outside of the phone number, address and birthday, this will somehow sync. IE: change the text tone---that will sync for some reason. The issue of syncing is in the detail of the contact record, just not all fields. My bigger question is what will happen when this is actually fixed by Apple? What record is going to win in the sync? Or are we all going to see a problem with these records out of sync? I know for myself I have made changes in iCloud on the phone, on the iPad and my MBP. So something that I think we all need to be conscious of.

So things have moved on here! I've just got my new MacBook Pro Touch Bar (Squeee!). Went through all the set up stuff and now contact syncing is working on my new Mac. But still not on my old one.

The only thing that's different on the new one that might have some bearing on it is that I didn't make my Facebook login active in System Preferences/Internet Accounts on the new machine, and it was on the old one. Unfortunately I don't have time to test that hypothesis by doing things to my old MBP. The problem seemed in some way to be connected with the photos that had automatically downloaded from facebook (which I didn't even know about).

I wonder if the problem is something to do with photos, and the link with facebook meant that it kept re-downloading some photos that caused the problem, hence why it would seem fixed but then start agin. I did find another contact with a photo, when I thought I had deleted them all, but I wasn't really paying attention at that point. Making the Facebook account inactive in Internet accounts means it's not doing that on my new machine?

I'm not a Techie so I have no idea why that might be connected but those are my observations.

I have this issue on Sierra. Spent many hours on the phone with Apple - still no solution.

Given the issues people have on this thread, the issue is likely with iCloud itself, not the Mac OS.

I could not get any contacts to upload to iCloud, except by manually dragging them to iCloud from On my mac. This results in duplicated contacts etc.

As for the solution proposed, deleting the application support address book folder would delete all of you data, correct? If so, not a good solution.

Backup (archive) your address book first.

Something else I noticed - you can save pictures to iCloud and it will sync correctly. You CANNOT add photos to the Mac by either selecting your Photos via the edit button, or dragging a saved photo into the contact. These both result in the same sync freeze. So for those of you who still want photos, add them via iCloud.

I am not sure if you need to remove all of your 2k+ photos. In my experience the breaking of the sync only happened to records/pictures added after the upgrade to macOS High Sierra. Any contact you already had in place before that upgrade will continue to sync fine, with the picture and all.

I would suggest to try and figure out which records you added since the High Sierra upgrade and start with those (unfortunately I do not know of a way the filter the most recent added records, which could help with that).

Another suggestion would be to remove this contacts via the Contacts app on your Mac, when you added them there initially. Would be a generic waste of time to process all your 2k+ records imho. Other than this I have no suggestion on how to bulk remove pictures, sorry. Nevertheless, curious to hear if you can make it work again without having to change all of your 2k+ records.

If after that detailed process and after a day it stopped updating then go to the library and once again clear all cashes.

Turn off iCloud contacts, clear all library cashes (provided in original sequence), restart mac, then turn on contacts.

I'm going to pipe in here to say, I'm another user who has followed both the simple (turning off and on icloud sync), the medium (deleting the addressbook from library/applicationsupport), and the extreme (following all of the above instructions, deleting all traces of 'addressbook' from four different folders in the library, and doing the restarts exactly as instructed). (Note I did not try the deleting all images suggestion some have suggested; however I never add photos to contacts manually anyway. And, with 8000 contacts this would take days to execute in the hope it might work.)

All of the library-cleansing/iCloud-disconnecting protocols at some point SEEMED to work — iCloud would repopulate my Contacts, and sync would work for a day or so. Lots of people on this forum have celebrated such successes - I suspect, prematurely. How many others haven't reported back that these 'fixes' are VERY temporary? Perhaps some have had actual lasting success. I haven't. Perhaps people have carried on for weeks before realizing they're not syncing properly again.

In other news, I went to a "Genius" bar yesterday, and was told to look for malware. We actually did find some malware. He said that might be the problem. Malware gone (that's not a bad thing), all above processes repeated. Same result — very temporary success.

Apple needs to provide an actual fix. This is ridiculous.

Yes...go on??? Is it worth removing it to see what happens???

I deleted everything in ~/Library/Containers that had addressbook in the name. I still have a contact that I created on the iPhone, complete with a picture, that will not sync to my MacBook. I can see it in iCloud.com.

Update to this. I've found that the syncing worked once, then does not continue to work. Contacts I add to my phone end up in iCloud.com but they never reach either of my macs. Contacts entered into either mac never reach iCloud.

The problem is still the same.

Deleting some containers or caches will only solve the problem for a moment, the sync to iCloud still does not work properly.

This is clearly a very annoying bug that is also not solved with 10.13.1.

I'm having this problem too. Any contacts added on Macbook Pro in Contacts App aren't synced to iCloud.com, iPhone 7 or iPad Pro. All are running latest OS versions. None of the contacts added have photos attached. Bizarrely adding a Group syncs instantly, but then adding the contacts to it works on Mac but not on iCloud etc. Then deleting the group on Mac doesn't delete it from iCloud. Adding a contact on iCloud syncs to iOS devices but not to Mac.

It's been happening to me definitely since 10th Nov as that's when I added a small batch (5 contacts) and created the group. I then used it to send an email with no problem but noticed today that the group hadn't synced to my iPad.

Hi Diane:

Yes, this works but only for syncing all the current contacts; however, when adding new contacts it starts all over and iCloud still does not sync all the contacts.

Apple and the advanced tech team is working on this issue as everything is pointing to a hardware issue on the Mac and not a syncing issue.

🙂

After reading thru this whole thread. I have the same problem(s). I have a call with a tech today that has been working this for me for the last 3 weeks +. One of the posts sounded like my issue to a "T", but age and model of mac is wrong. I will post what ever the result is after my call this afternoon. The engineers do know that there is a file/folder that is missing on my mac from the data captures that I have sent them. So it is a matter of how this is put back/recreated etc. Lucky for me I have a couple of years of back ups, so it may require that we get one of those. I can tell you this it is not hardware related, and if I was to guess this is an OS upgrade issue and should be impacting everyone, but everyone may not use contacts the same way. It is a very funny issue. iCloud will take a new contact with just a name, the moment you put any detail in that contact it will not sync. This is creating a new contact on your Mac. Create a new one on your phone it will go to the cloud, ipad (if you have one) or any other ios devices, it just never gets to the Mac. Let's see what happens today. I was glad that I stumbled upon this post. I did not see this until today.

This is driving me crackers! I've just been tinkering around with this and note that if I create a contact on my MBP it creates a #no name entry on iCloud (I now have a list of 15 entries of this type on iCloud). I wondered if this is connected to GwMichas comments about it can cope with an empty record but not one with data in it. With this in mind I created a contact with just a lower case a in the notes field on MBP and that contact was created straight away in iCloud in the #no name list, including the a! So then I tried creating a contact on MBP with just a in the first name field. Synced to iCloud straight away! So then I tried adding more characters to the name field and they all synced to iCloud. But I also notice that sometimes when I have created a contact I also got another #no name entry. I tried a few more, adding more data, and got as far as adding Af Afleck as a contact using first and last name fields - that one synced straight away! I also observe that once I've made a contact on MBP, even if it synced to iCloud, any amendments to it don't sync.

Also, anything created in iCloud doesn't go down to MBP...

I think the conclusion I have come to so far, as a non-technical person, is that there is something very unusual and obscure going on here that's to do with the interface between iOS 11 and High Sierra - it's not that they aren't talking to each other at all, its that something is being 'lost in translation'

I'm going to give chrisadamswilsons solution a try tomorrow when I have some awake grey matter...