Contacts will not sync in iTunes - not using iCloud

Thank you. That does not solve the problem. I have the same issue where synching in Tunes (12.8.0.150) using the Lighting cable rather than via iCloud. There are no error messages that the process has failed. I only notice because there are new entries made on my MacBook Air (macOS 10.13.6) that are not present on my iPhone (iOS 11.4.1). Edits to current contacts are not transferred to my iPhone. Choosing the option to "replace information on this iPhone" from iTunes does not fix the problem. Downloaded music and movies from iTunes will synch to my iPhone.

Thank you for raising this problem Sy Creed.

I have the same problem. I am now unable to sync the contacts on my computer (iMac late 2015 in this case) with either iPhone or iPad. It seems to have begun to happen when I upgraded to High Sierra. Currently running 10.13.6 on the Mac and 11.4.1 on the mobile devices.

This is most frustrating when newly added or updated contacts are not reflected on the mobiles. Fortunately, I keep the Mac as the source file, so have not lost any contacts (yet).

James

Local/USB contact sync does appear to be broken. If I turn off contact sync, the contacts do in fact get deleted but when I turn contact sync back on, an old version of the contacts reappears even if I tell iTunes to replace the phone contacts with the contacts from OS X.

I've been working on this all day and the old contact groups show up in iTunes and it will not bring over new contacts. Did Apple take away our direct sync ability again? I do not want to use iCloud. Several years ago I had to set up the server software to sync. Is this the final answer, "contacts cannot necessarily be synced as they were before,...". I agree, this is NOT acceptable.

<For whatever reason, I was unable to edit my previous post>

It occurred to me to clarify how to get sync working again. Once you see what field value is causing the problem, just change the value to something to which sync doesn't object. Once sync is working again, you'll most likely have to manually resolve conflicts depending on how many contacts you'd edited while sync was broken.

Charles.

Regarding the Apple support comment: you have been misinformed. Local sync *is* still supported. There has been no end of life announcement on this feature. The problem is a bug. New values have been added to some fields of both the iPhone and OSX Contacts apps that do not pass error/value checking in AddressBookSync in OSX. So the issue is not lack of support but rather a bug in OSX AddressBookSync. If the offending values are changed to values that *do* pass AddressBookSync value checking then contact sync works as expected. The problematic values to which I'm aware (there may be others) are the "Related Name" values of "daughter" and "son". If you use the older value of "child", sync will work. Here's an example of the error message one will see in the OSX Console when you use one of the affected values:

default 10:02:43.270179 -0500 AddressBookSync [0x7fbeb54087b0] |ISyncSession|Error| ISyncSession record validation failure: Value daughter pushed for enumeration property type on com.apple.contacts.Related Name is not an allowed value.

Charles.

Same issue here - no iTunes syncing of Contacts between iPhone 6 running latest iOS and MacBook Pro running latest OS. I've made changes/additions on desktop that do not show up on the phone and vise versa. Hello, Apple - PLEASE fix this "bug"!

Same issue here. This was a good feature, but it's becoming unreliable. Please fix this Apple. iCloud is great whilst you have internet access, but if you get into areas without access, that information is no longer available.

This might be worth a look.

iTunes for Mac: Sync contacts, calendars, and other info with iPod, iPhone, or iPad

I have the same problem. I DON'T USE ICLOUD. I sync using iTunes. I have iPhone 6S running iOS 12.1.2 and iMac running High Sierra 10.13.6. Problem started after upgrading to High Sierra. Changes made on iPhone contacts don't show up on iMac and vice versa. Totally unacceptable. Why hasn't apple fixed this problem which has been plaguing the apple community using iCloud as well?

I can absolutely confirm the observation of rldillon!

The application "Contacts" and the application "iTunes" do not seem to use the same database. Whatever you type and edit in the application "Contacts", it won't be regarded by the application "iTunes" while it syncs with the connected device (e.g. an iPhone).

Furthermore, based on my experiments, the database that is used by the application "iTunes" must be pretty old, maybe about 1 year. Maybe this was the time when the faulty update of iTunes arrived.

Sometimes a sync failure will be caused by a single corrupt record in the contacts database. Finding it can be a problem, however. In my experience it is usually the first record. As it's a Mac you can try syncing using iCloud.

Here's my specs: MacBook Air 13 inch Early 2015 running Mojave (10.14.3), iPhone SE running iOS 12 (12.1.4). I've been dealing with this for a while. I talked to a senior advisor back around October 2018, and he was supposed to contact me again, but never did. I began working on it on my own and have reinstalled my MacBook Air's OS a few times trying to fix it. I noticed pretty quickly that iTunes and Contacts were not communicating like they should, but never thought of it being a database that iTunes wasn't prepared to deal with. I just finished manually reinstalling Mojave and did not use any part of my Time Machine backups because I thought some corrupt file was making the problem. I now see that it is not the problem, because I keep having the issue. I uploaded my contacts to iCloud for the process to not have to use any 'corrupt' files, but to no avail. After reading this thread, I'm going to try going through all my contacts and taking out any "Son" or "Daughter" fields changing them to "child" and see if that changes anything. Thanks for the info.

So I went back through and changed all fields "Son" or "Daughter" to "child". I also took out my cousin's maiden name just to be safe and syncing through iTunes suddenly works! I wish I'd known this six months ago, but oh well, I'm happy I know it now. If anyone else has issues, I would recommend seeing if there are any new fields that were filled in in contacts.

Thank you. I have had this same problem for over a year on various iOS and OSX versions--I usually keep my Macbook, iPhone, and iPad up to date with the latest. I am currently using MacOS Catalina 10.15 and iOS 13.1.2. Local sync has always worked with Calendar, but has not worked with Contacts for a long time. Based on what Ganzhorn said, I went through every one of my contacts and deleted every field that had "son" or "spouse"--I did not have any other family-member fields in my contacts. I deleted them on my Macbook and my iPhone and then synced . . . it worked like a charm. I may run some tests to see if it is only certain family-member fields that cause this problem, but maybe not . . . I can always add family members to the notes. One other anomaly that I will share: when having this problem I could add a contact to my iPhone, local sync to my Macbook, and it would not show up, but then, if I local synced my iPad to my Macbook, the new contact would be on the iPad--the Macbook acted as a pass-through but would not show the contact itself. Thanks again to Ganzhorn . . .