My wife and I have shared an iCloud account (mine) for years. Mainly so we can always sync contacts and calendars for three iPads, two iPhones, an iMac, and a MBP. She has her own iCloud account, but doesn’t use it. Question 1: How do I share/sync our contacts if I split her from my account? Question 2: How do I import all our historical and future calendar entries into a new shared family calendar?
10 cheers to you for your valuable advice!
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David Marquettet
Everyone should have their own iCloud account. Sharing one leads to all sorts of problems.
There is no "shared contacts" function -- but do you really have that many contacts? Just export the ones you have now, and she can bring them into her Contacts app under her iCloud account. If you add a new one, you can always export or share that contact in a variety of ways.
But if you really want to, you can have her share your iCloud contacts. Just add your account as another iCloud account on her Mac account and on her devices. Then only choose Contacts as the only thing to use with that account -- not email, messages, etc.
Then you've got the trick of making sure that when you add a new contact that you are doing so for the right iCloud account. Just something else to check for. Plus you have to remember another iCloud account and password. It is a bit of a pain.
She could always add your iCloud account to her devices and uncheck everything except the Contacts. You may want to try that first.
As for calendars, that's pretty easy. Just create that shared family calendar and start using it. You can easily choose an event from your personal calendar and edit it to change the calendar to the family one. No way to do that automatically -- and I don't think you would want to. Just take the time to do it and get only the events that make sense.
Thank you very much for the advice. We have about 2,000 contacts - personal, business - and being able to sync phone and address changes across all our devices has been very helpful. Change on one device, all devices update automagically. Apple lets me share AppStore purchases, calendars, notes, others functions. So perhaps they will someday have an elegant solution for contacts, too. Hoping....
2,000? Wow. Perhaps you need a pro solution then. There are many companies that offer business-class contacts management. They have web apps and desktop apps and all sorts of features. I don't use any of them so I don't have any recommendations, but perhaps you should look into that.