I don’t know about
you, but I have been curating a list of my working associates, friends and
family ever since I got my first email address. Once cell phones came along, I
started collecting phone numbers and contacts this way. Then, I came to work at
my current job where they handed me a sweet Palm Treo 700. At the time, I
combined all of my contacts, emails and phone numbers in to one grand list and
was happy!
As time wore on, I
added more contacts, changed and added email addresses, changed email
providers, got a smart phone, etc. Each time I made a switch, I did my best to
migrate and merge my contacts. Over time, errors were made, duplications
happened, and things were a mess.
I thought I solved
the issue two or so years ago by deciding to make my work Gmail account the
master of all of my contact information and did my best to clean it up and set
up my computer to sync with Gmail. Once I got an iPhone and various iPads, I
thought that by setting it all up through Google as an Exchange account, things
would just work.
It seemed as it was
for a while, but then one day after adding a new contact on my phone, I tried
to bring up that information in Gmail….. No luck. I had no idea how long this
was the case, but it appears that Google changed their system as of January 31,
2013 to not support Exchange for new devices/setups but would allow it to work
if you had Exchange set up prior to the switch.
It seems that I did
have contacts syncing, but I was syncing with my iCloud account. So, if I were
using Apple Mail or Contacts, overeating was fine. Since I spend 90% of my
email time on Gmail in Chrome, that wasn’t doing me much good.
Long story short, I’ve
spent the last two days getting contacts off of my phone, cleaning up the mess
of duplicates and detritus, and creating one ‘Truth’ of my contact information
that I will here on out sync with. You can read a great overview of the changes
and process here, but here’s what I did…
First step – make
sure to get all of my contacts off of my phone. I was not sure if any sync was
going on, so I turned to My Contacts Backup Pro from the App Store. I had to
pony up the $2 since I had more than the 200 contacts the free version will
support. With all of the duplicates and junk, I had over 1500 to clean up. Oy!
This app was slick. Tell it to back up your contacts, and it will generate an
email with a contacts file attached that you can send to yourself or any other
address. You can also set it up to do a one-time or regular sync to Drop box so
that if the only place you have contacts are is your phone, you won’t lose
everything when you drop the phone in the toilet.
BACKUP! Before doing
anything else, I didn’t want to end up losing ALL of my contacts, so I made a
backup up my current list with the Contacts app on my Mac. You can do this by
opening up Contacts, heading to File –> Export… –> Contacts Archive… and
following the steps from there (image). So, I now have a backup of all of the
contacts on my Mac and all of the contacts on my phone. Next I imported all of
my phone contacts into Contacts, and moved forward.
Second – clean up
the duplicates and random contacts that accumulate over time. As I said, I had
over 1,500 total contacts. I KNOW that I don’t know that many people (or at
least that many that I want or need to communicate with). The Apple Contacts
app does ok with this sort of task, but I wanted to do it faster and better. I
looked in the Mac App Store and found Address Book Clear out.
After importing my
phone contacts into the Contacts app (File –> Import… and browse to your
saved My Contacts backup file), Address Book Clear out could do its work. It
did a really great job with identifying and helping me process contacts that were
either identical, All & More (one contact has everything a similar card
has, plus some additional information), close matches, and possible duplicates.
If you trust it, you can eliminate all of the duplicates that come up as
identical, as well as keep the ‘all and more’ cards with one click for each
type. I didn’t trust it so I went through all of my duplicates one by one. The
program also lets you easily drag addresses, notes, and phone numbers, even
contact photos from one card to another so that you can clean things up and
make one card perfect so that you can delete other similar duplicates.
For me, this process
took about a day. But I went from 1,500 contacts down to 680 some odd. Much
improved!
Third – Cleaning up
Persons/Companies and updating Groups. I went back to the Apple Contacts app on
my computer for this. I had a LOT of contacts that looked different, but I had
added them once as a Person when they were really a business or mailing list,
and some individuals that I had listed as companies. Contacts in this situation
may have been duplicated as people when they were really companies, so I had to
merge them back up.
As far as adding
people to the Groups that I wanted, Address Book Clear out has an interesting
grid view to add people to groups, but I had too many contacts and too many
groups for it to be functional for me. I again went through my list and just
drug them into the group(s) I wanted them in in Contacts. This took another
half of a day, but this really helped me out and I’m now down to 640 contacts.
Now, I have one
‘Truth’ of my contacts on the Apple side of things – My iCloud/Mac and my
iPhone. I again made a backup from Contacts called ‘Clean’ with the date so
that I again had something to fall back on if things got catastrophic during
the next phase – Googlization!
Fourth – bring in
Google Contacts and eliminate further duplicates. At this point, I could have
just imported my ‘Clean’ contact list into Gmail. However, I had more fine
grained control if I used Address Book Clearout for processing dupes. So, I exported
my Gmail contacts to a file, File –> Import… them to my Mac/iCloud Contacts
app so that I can process the duplicates with Address Book Clearout. Again, I
made a backup once I was done, dated and called something like ‘Combined Clean’
– this may be the most important step since the next step is on the SCARY side.
Fifth – Delete your
Gmail ‘My Contacts’ and import the combined clean list. I told you this would
be the scary part. I didn’t want to deal with any more duplicates (but I did
anyway), so I selected all of the contacts in My Contacts and deleted them by
heading to ‘More –> Delete contacts’. Once I saw a blank list in Gmail, I
went back to the ‘More’ menu and selected ’Import…’ I selected my latest,
cleanest contact list, and patiently waited for the spinning icon to stop while
it uploaded my 7 mb of contact information. I had a few dupes since Gmail
really didn’t delete ALL of my contacts, but I took care of them quickly with
‘More –> Find & merge duplicates…’
Now, I have one
complete ‘Truth’ for all of my contact information that I will add to and sync
with other systems and services. Whew!
Last, I need to wrap
this all up and get my new clean list back on my iPhone – where all of the
trouble began. To do this, I went to the Settings app on the iPhone, scrolled
down to ‘Mail, Contacts, and Calendars’, and turned off Contact syncing in both
my iCloud accounts and work Gmail accounts. Again, it’s a scary thing but I
have lots and lots of backups by this point. Now, I need to set up a new
account that is only for contacts, called a CardDAV account. The instructions
on how to set this up are here from Google. If you are still syncing contacts
from another account, you’ll need to scroll down on the same page and set up
Google contacts as your default account, so that when you add new contacts on
your phone they’ll be instantly updated and added to Gmail.
That’s it! It’s a
lot, I know, but I was SO happy when I added a new contact and updated another
on my phone and could see the updates a few seconds later in Google Gmail
Contacts.
Article Credit: http://sedcclint.com
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