How To Share Only What You Want From Your Mac and iPhone Contact Card

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to share your contact information with somebody else without sharing everything. 

So let's say you want to share your contact information with somebody else. You can send them a copy of your contact from your Mac or your iPhone but your contact may have things in it that you don't want to share at that moment. For instance, when you're sharing with somebody for a business reason you may not want to include your home address, your home email or phone number, or your birthday. Fortunately there is a way to specify exactly what you want to share when you share your card. You do it differently depending upon whether you're on the Mac or the iPhone. So let's start with the Mac. 

On the Mac let's go to the Contacts App. In the Contacts App you see all the contacts here. Hopefully you should see one contact that is you and it has this special symbol next to it. If no contact here represents you, you want to, of course, create that. You probably already have one though. Just make sure it's got this symbol next to it. If  it doesn't select it and then go to Card and use Make This My Card. That will add that symbol there. Then your contact information will be used in a variety of ways. Like, for instance, specifying the writer in a Pages document in the Info with that document. 

Now, to Share your contact information you can use the Share button here and you can then select how you want to share. You can also go to Card and then Share My Card and you can email or message your card from here. You can also Drag & Drop. So you can turn this into a file that you can share in a variety of different ways, like over a different messaging app by just dragging it out and dropping it into the Finder, into a Finder window or in this case just the Desktop. I get this VCF card. A VCF card is a very standard format that should work on any system. It is not Apple specific. 

So I can quit Contacts here and just have this file. I can preview it by using Quick Look just like I can preview an image or a PDF.  So I can select it and then press the Spacebar and it will show me the information in it. Here I can see all that information was included. My home phone number, my home email, home address, my birthday, all this stuff I don't want to be in this card that I'm going to share with somebody in a business situation. So let's look at how you can create a VCF card that doesn't have that. 

The way you do that is different on the Mac than it is on the iPhone. Let's start on the Mac. So I'm going to go back into the Contacts App here and the key is to go into Contacts Settings. Then go to the VCard section. You have to turn On enable Private Me Card. Now, once you have that turned On when you go to Edit your card you are going to see something you wouldn't have seen before. These checkboxes here on the right. These indicate what gets shared. So I'm going to turn off my home phone number, my home email address, my birthday, and my home physical address. Then I'm going to click Done. Now look what happens when I drag this out to the Finder. I get a VCF file. If I select it and then use the spacebar to preview you can see I get only that information that I specified. My work phone number, my work email address. The rest isn't included. 

Now I can go back in and Edit again and turn all this stuff On. It won't change this card that I've exported. So I can rename this as like my business contact card and only send this when I want to just give somebody that basic information. Then I can have, maybe, another on or just share from here when I had everything turned On normally. 

One note here and that's about the Note. You turn this Off and you would think your Notes don't get included in the VCF file. But there has always been this bug where they do! So hopefully you don't have any notes about yourself. This is something you would typically use for another person, not yourself, anyway. Of course if you have all your private information setup with those checkboxes you can now share it in all the different ways and would only include the parts that were checked. 

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So how about on the iPhone. Does it work the same way? Well, not at all actually. If you go to Settings and then you go to Apps at the bottom and then you go to Contacts you won't find a setting for a private me card. You will find My Info. This is where you can setup which of the contacts  is you. But, when you go to Contacts here and look at your card, like I'm looking at right here, if I go to Edit it there are no checkboxes next to any of this. So you can't define what is sent when you share your contact info. 

So the way to actually have it done on the iPhone is you do it in the moment. So here I am looking at my contact and let's say I want to share that with somebody. I can go down here to the bottom and there is Share Contact. At that moment you can see all these checkboxes. I can turn Off things and turn On other things. Then when I select Done then it will go to the next step which allows me to share via airdrop, messages, mail, however. I can even go down here and Save to Files and it will save a VCF file with just the things that were checked. 

So every time you share your contact you have to specify what is being shared. If you want to have a VCF file ready to go you can just export it now with exactly the information you want and then have that in your iCloud Drive and share that file instead. 

Now there is a special mode on the iPhone that allows you to bring two iPhones together. It is a function of AirDrop called Bring Devices Together. If you go to Settings, General and then AirDrop you'll see Bring Devices Together. If both phones have it turned On you can actually bring two phones together, like this, and then it will show up on the top like that. It does a special thing. Before you tap the Share, tap on your Contact right here, like that. Now you can go through and check what information is shared and what isn't. The difference here between the functionality in the Contacts App is it actually remembers the checkboxes. So it just has my settings from before. So if you just set this up to only Share the basic business information then the next time you use Bring Devices Together it should share the same information. But you can always just tap on the Contact there to check and then tap Save and then Share.

I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.