Why You Have Duplicate Contacts On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Do you see duplicate contacts on your Mac in the Context App and can't explain it? Perhaps you see contacts there that you don't see on another device like an iPhone? Let me show you why this is going on.

This is a common question I get. You've got contacts in your Contacts App but sometimes they are duplicates there and you can't really explain why you didn't add the same contact more than once, or maybe if you look on another device, like say your iPhone, you notice you're missing some contacts that you see on your Mac. Well, the reason for these problems is you've got multiple accounts. 

You see, the Contacts App mainly just looks at Cloud accounts to show you the contacts there. For instance it may show you your iCloud contacts. But it may also show you contacts from another account like Google or Yahoo. For instance here I am in the Contacts App and you can see I've got two contacts with the same name here and for this one I've got three contacts. So what's going on here. Well, you can't tell from this view but this contact is in my iCloud Account and this contact is in my Google Account. In fact if you click on this button here to reveal the left sidebar or go to View, Show Lists you're going to get the sidebar here that shows you each of your accounts. In this case I've got iCloud here and I have also got gmail. I've also got a section call On My Mac, which is for contacts that aren't in any account. They're just stored locally on my Mac. 

You'll also see some other sections here as well. But the ones we're interested in right now are the ones for Cloud accounts. So, iCloud and Gmail. Now if I look under All iCloud notice I only see this person once. It just has this one contact that has her picture. I also see this contact once. If I go to Gmail here and look at all my Gmail you can see I've just got a few contacts here. Here's a different contact for that same person and a different contact for this person as well. So these contacts, they are all stored in my Google or Gmail account. These contacts are all stored in my iCloud Account. But when I look at All Contacts it merges those together. So I see two of these and three of these because I've got a third one that is just stored locally on my Mac. 

In addition if you look at the Gmail account here you'll notice that there are this contact. This contact is here in my Gmail account. But if you look at my iCloud Account here you'll see it's not listed there. It's only in my Google Account. So this explains why you may not see some of these contacts if you look on your iPhone or iPad. Because if on your iPhone or iPad you are only using your iCloud Account.Then you're not going to see the contacts that you have that are only in another account like the Google Account, or are only On Your Mac locally, not in any account. You'll just see exactly this list here if you only have that one account on your iPhone or iPad. 

Now you can add other accounts on your iPhone and iPad just like you can on your Mac. So you may see the same thing. But a very common problem people have is they only setup their iCloud Account, say, on their iPhone but on their Mac they may have these older accounts that they connected years ago and they are simply not on their newer devices. 

Now, another way this happens commonly is you simply go to add a new account and you don't realize you're adding a Contact Account as well as an email account. For instance, maybe you're in the Mail App here and you go to Mail and then Accounts, because you want to add a new account like a Google Account. You go and add an account and when you do and you get to the end screen for adding it you're going to see all of these switches here for different aspects of that Cloud Account. So you may want to have Mail checked but you may have left Contacts turned On. Then perhaps back years ago you added a few contacts to this Google Account. By having this switch On that means that those entries will be shown in Contacts. But you could simply turn this switch Off here. So this disables the Google Account in Contacts. If I switch back to the Contacts App here I'll no longer see it here on the left. If I Refresh this list, the easiest way to do that is just quitting Contacts and restarting it, you'll notice now I'm missing that second contact here. You can see one of the three contacts here from this group, that's gone too because the Google Account is no longer linked. If I go back in and turn this account back On it's going to add it back here and again it's best to quit and restart Contacts so that it refreshes this list. Now again I see the two contacts here and the three contacts here. 

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Now one way to handle this if you want to keep all these accounts here, but when you look at All Contacts you only want to see each name once is to link contacts. So let's take a look here at this entry. We can see the phone number here ends in 1212. There's an email address, a home page, and a birthday. In this one, which is in the Google Account there's also a different phone number, a 2424 number here, and another email address. If I were to select both of these and then go to Card, Link Selected Cards, it will link the two of them. Each one is still going to have its own entry in either account and they will show up whether you're looking at All Contacts, All iCloud, or All Gmail. But it's going to show up as one single card now. Notice that both the phone numbers are included. Both the emails addresses are included here as well. I had to Quit and Restart Contacts but now I can see information like Home Page and Birthday. That's all listed here as well. If I look under Gmail I can look at the same card. If I look at iCloud it's going to show me all the information from both cards here. 

But, be careful when using Link Selected Cards because you can't Undo it very easily in Contacts anymore. 

Another thing you could do is, you can decide to only use one Contacts Account. This is what I recommend. So you want to get rid of, say, your Google Account here and just keep your iCloud Account where you have been putting all of your new contacts. So to do that, of course, all you need to do is turn off that account. Before you do that you want to go in and you want to Copy any contacts from this account to iCloud. Now, doing that could create duplicates. So you probably only want to do that if you know that it is not a duplicate. You know it is only here in the Google Account. The way to do that is pretty simply. You just drag the contact. I'll take this one, because I know this is only in my Google Account. I will drag it into iCloud. So now I've got that one and it is showing in All Contacts here. It's under iCloud and it is under Goggle. Notice it is only there the one time. It acts like a linked card. It's in both accounts but it's linked.

However, now that I've copied it and placed it into the iCloud Account I can turn Off the Google Account. I'll do that in Contact, Settings this time by going to Accounts here, going to the Gmail Account, and I will disable the Gmail account. Now I only have iCloud but yet that contact is still there because I had placed a copy of it in All iCloud. 

Now if you do that for a contact you already have it's going to warn you that there is a duplicate. So if you're not sure if you've got a duplicate or not usually just dragging and dropping it in there will warn you and then you could decide not to import that one. 

Now the same goes for anything On My Mac. On My Mac means it's local only. So, if something is here and you've got your iPhone and your Mac syncing over iCloud, well anything On My Mac is not going to sync. You're not going to see it on your iPhone. So you're going to want to take a contact from On My Mac and then drag it over to iCloud to add it there. Then it will sync to your iPhone. So you really want to avoid using On My Mac if you can. In fact, if On My Mac is empty I would simply Delete this card here. Then it should disappear completely from the left sidebar. 

There is on last thing that you need to do. You need to check this setting in Contacts under General. Look for Default Account and you'll see all your accounts listed here. Make sure that is set correctly. If you're just sticking with one account it should just be that one account. But, if you still want to view your Gmail contacts here, say, then you want to make sure you've selected the right account for New Contacts to be added. This is also where a lot of people go wrong. They've got the wrong one selected here and they don't know why every time they add a contact on their Mac, which goes to the Gmail Account, why it doesn't show up on their iPhone that only is linked to the iCloud Account.

So the ultimate way to keep your contacts really clean is to use only one account, probably iCloud. Don't store anything On My Mac and only have that one account enabled on your Mac and your other Apple devices. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.