Clean Up Your Contacts App

Over time your Contacts app gets messy with old contacts you no longer need, duplicates hastily created and information that with too few or many details. But cleaning up your contacts doesn't have to be overwhelming.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at cleaning up your Contacts. 
Chances are, over the years, you accumulated a lot of contacts in your Contacts App. Let's take a look at how you can cleanup your contacts. Before doing any cleaning up why not take the opportunity to backup your contacts. Then if you make a mistake you have a backup of that information. It's a good idea to do it from time to time as well. These contacts don't take up much space so it is pretty easy to back them up and store them away somewhere.
In the Contacts App on your Mac you can go to File and you can Export. One of the things you can do is export a Contacts Archive. When you do that you're going to get this one file here and it's not going to be that big. Just store this away. It even has a date on it already. If you double-click it it will actually ask if you want to Import all that into Contacts. That's not the only way to backup your contacts. You can back them up in a more universal format by first selecting all the contacts that you want to export. In this case I've just selected all contacts here so it is going to backup everything. Go to File, Export and then export as a V Card. I'm going to get a file that's VCF format which means you can actually import on completely different systems, rename it with the date and store it away. It also works if you simply Drag & Drop. I can drag All Contacts here and I get the same thing.
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So now that you have a backup you may feel a little more free to experiment with the contacts that you've got. One of the most common things people want to do in cleaning up their contacts is get rid of duplicates. You can see a few here. Now it is very important that you understand why you have duplicates. One of the most common reasons is something a lot of people don't think about. If you look at the left sidebar here it shows you All My Accounts. If you don't see it go to View, Show Lists and it will show this over here. Notice I've got an iCloud Account and a Gmail Account. Very common when setting up your email on your Mac or iPhone to add multiple accounts. When you do that it is also very common to not notice that you're not just adding email, you're also adding a contacts database. So, in this case I've added two contact's databases because I have two email accounts that I've added to my Mac. Now my iCloud Account has most of my contacts in it. But my Gmail Account, my Goggle Account, also has some contacts in it. You can see there is one here for this person and there's also one here for this person in iCloud. So when I look at All Contacts, which shows me both iCloud and Gmail and any others I may have, I see two for this person. So before you deal with duplicates you want to figure out exactly what you want to do with your contacts. Do you want to simplify everything and have all your contacts in one place such as iCloud. I know that is how a lot of Apple users, myself included, like to do it. All my contacts are in iCloud and I don't use the contacts database in Goggle or other accounts that I may use. If that is the case, then you want to go to your other accounts here, like this one, and if you see a contact here that you want to move over to iCloud you can do that. You can select it and drag it here. It will export it from Goggle and import it into iCloud making a second copy of it here in iCloud. Then go to Contacts, Settings, and then go to Accounts and here is where you can select an Account, like there's that Goggle one and I can disable it. This won't erase anything. It's all still going to be there in my Goggle account if I were to login on the web. But it means that my contacts app will no longer show this account, only the iCloud Account and that alone may actually get rid of any problem I have with duplicates.
Now another way to deal with duplicates is to leave the two accounts here but link contacts together. I've got these two accounts here. I can select one and then Command Click to select the other and select both contacts. I can go to Card, Link Selected Cards. When I do that notice I end up with one card here. When I select it I can see it says Cards and shows that there are two of them, a Gmail one and an iCloud one. If I click the Gmail one I see the Gmail one. If I click the iCloud one I see the iCloud one. But here in Contacts when I View All Contacts it just shows me this person one time with all of the information from the Cards I have linked combined together. I should warn you that in some situations when you link two cards like that from separate accounts a minute or so later you'll see the two of them separate again. So this happens when one of the two card accounts kind of rejects the link and just reasserts itself as a separate card. In that case linking the two cards isn't really going to be an option. You're probably going to want to take the information you want to save from the second card and then add that to the first card and just have one card in which ever account you want as your primary contacts' database.
There is also another scenario. Notice these two cards right here. These two cards are both in iCloud. If I go to iCloud I can still see them. So for some reason I created a second card for the same person without realizing they had this first card. When I select both of these at the same time and I go to Card I'm not going to see the ability to link. Instead I'm going to see Merge selected cards. Since they are both iCloud cards I can merge them together, adding the information from one to the other so that it is all combined into one card. In fact you can do this automatically. If you've got a lot of contacts with this problem there is actually an option here under Card, Look for Duplicate. It will find the duplicate and allow you to just merge them all in one go.
So the next thing you may want to do is to actually remove some of the contacts here. Now, there may be contacts that you just want to remove forever. You are absolutely sure you won't need them anymore and you can do that by selecting them and then going to Edit and Delete Card if you wish or you can just select it and press the Delete Key and it will delete it. But an alternative to doing that is to Archive the card. To do that you just select the card like this and drag it to a Finder window. Like I'm just going to drag it here to the Desktop. But you may want to create a folder somewhere and you can just as easily drag into there. I'll just move this one in here. Notice if I select the contact I can press the spacebar and it will actually show me the contact information. I can use it just like I could in the Contacts App. I can also just add it back to Contacts. You can just archive these, get them out of your Contacts App, delete them after you Archive them and know that you still have it saved somewhere but it is not going to get in the way when you just want to look up your contacts to find somebody.
Another thing you may want to consider is sometimes not storing contact information in Contacts. For instance, you might want to create a note that has information, like names and phone numbers, email addresses and such, for people like a handyman or electricians or plumbers or anybody that works on your home. Put that all in one note. Easy access, it is easy to add information to it, and when somebody needs a recommendation you can just send them the entire thing. Or perhaps if you get a list of twenty names and phone numbers for a group at work or your organization or school provides a list of names and contact information, you can put that in a note and keep it out of your contacts.
Now another thing you may want to do is tidy up your list. I don't have any list here but it is easy to create a list and you can easily add people to these various lists, put them in multiple lists and all of that. Lists are easy to create, easy to delete, and easy to alter. Just because you create one for a purpose doesn't mean you need to keep it around forever. Remember the contacts aren't in this list. It is kind of like a playlist in music or an album in Photos. All the contacts are here in your main database. This is just a way of viewing a subset of those. So I can select one and then go to Edit, Delete List, and delete it and those people are still here in my main list. So if you feel these are creating a lot of clutter then maybe just get rid of them. They don't actually get rid of the contacts and if they are not useful to you right now get rid of them. You can always recreate them.
Now let's talk about the contacts themselves. When you are viewing a contact you may want to clean it up. To do that you would go into Edit mode and here is where you can Add or Remove items. So you can remove items that you don't need anymore by using the Minus button right here. You can Add things if they are already listed. Even if they are not you can hit the Plus button and add all sorts of different fields here. Don't forget you also have the Note at the bottom where you can add sorts of miscellaneous things. That is searchable too. So when you Search if the term is used here in the Note it will come up.
A few tips to make each individual contact more useful. First of all, when a person is mainly a contact of yours because of the company they work for, consider checking the Company button and then typing the company name here. For instance, if this person is an accountant and they just happen to be your current contact at the company where you do your taxes you could put the name here and that's what will appear here in the list. You can still have their name in here but when you're assigned a new contact person you can simply update that by changing the name, changing the phone number, and leave the company alone. You can see when I do this now they appear here under the name of the company which is what you may be looking for more than the person's name.
If the person often goes by a different name and you find that when you search for them or maybe even ask Siri to make a phone call or something like that, you're using a name that isn't listed anywhere here you can add the nickname field. The nickname field allows you to type something else here, a nickname or something else you may call them. For instance for your spouse you might want to say wife or husband. Put it under nickname and then you can use that for searches or voice command.
Also, of course, pay attention to the picture here, because the picture is what is going to come up in lots of situations including when you get a phone call from them. Look at your photos and then you can select from a photo and you can even scale and adjust the photo and then Save. So if you have a photo of them anywhere in your Photos Library you can easily add it as the photo for them in the Contacts App.
One last tip here. It's going to have an entry for Ringtone. So you can set a custom ringtone that will work on your iPhone when they call. You can go to the Default so they just use whatever your default ringtone is. But you can also go all the way to the bottom and select None. So basically what you've done is you silenced this one person. It will still ring. You will still see the call showing up on the screen. But there won't be any audible ring to it. Also note you can set a text tone as well.
Now an important thing to keep in mind when you're cleaning up your contacts is you don't need to do them all at once. I often hear people describe cleaning up their contacts that seems like an overwhelming task. There's no reason it needs to be. You don't have to do it all at once. You can do just a few a day. Spend 5 minutes a day and after a few days or weeks eventually all of them will be cleaned up.
So now that you've gotten rid of duplicates, archived and deleted contacts you don't really need, and cleaned up individual contacts you want to make it easier to create new contacts in the future. When you go to create a new card it can be kind of overwhelming to have all of this here. Some of it you may hardly ever use. Go back to Contacts, Settings. Then go to Template. This template is exactly what you get when you create a new contact. So get rid of things that you really don't answer, especially if you don't answer them when you initially create a contact. Like you don't have to have Social Media here. Maybe not the birthday. Maybe not Homepage. If there is something else you find you always add you can go into here and you can add it for them to the template. So now that you've got this simple template here when you go to create a new card that basically is what is going to be here. There might be a few other things there as well, like the ringtone and text tone. You can always click the Plus button and access all of these different fields so you can still add everything. You're not going to be hit with a huge form when you first create a new contact.
So I hope this helps you cleanup your Contacts and keep them clean moving forward. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 5 Responses to “Clean Up Your Contacts App”

Lazer W.

3 weeks ago

Thank you! This was really helpful, I really appreciate it. In my case I'll use google contacts in the contacts app because I have an android phone and I want it to be synced together.

Jim Terrinoni

Good job, Gary. The one area I had a problem was Apple Support had me make a copy while we were testing for a backup to external drive problem. Later. either they guided me to it or I mistakenly added those counts back onto the main file. Thus, double everything. I have been taking five minutes per day and cleaning out. I do not want to store anymore than necessary in the cloud so I have been only adding those that I need access to (from my iPhone) when I don’t have my MacBook.

Carmen

2 weeks ago

Isn't there a way to see a list of contacts and delete a lot of of them at once? I thought there was a way to do that through iCloud. Thanks.

Gary Rosenzweig

Carmen: You can do that in the Contacts app, sure. Just select the ones you want and press the Delete key.

Elizabeth Gage

Such clear and concise instructions. Thank you (as always!)

Clean Up Your Contacts App

Comments: 5 Responses to “Clean Up Your Contacts App”

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