REMOVE Duplicate Contacts (FREE) - MAC, IPHONE, IPAD [2022] 

David A Cox…. You Sir are an online 8th degree black belt. Thank you so much for all of your time and effort to help all of us interested in getting better with the online world.

Thank you for this. I’ve had duplicates for months but didn’t know what to do about it. Your step by step approach will be my instruction manual to merge! 😀

One thing to note. When switching from Android to iPhone (as i did years ago once i'd seen the light!) one of the methods to get your contacts onto the iPhone was to import them into google first then sync your iPhone from your google account and that would transfer your contacts to your iPhone. Skip forward and if your iPhone still shows duplicate contacts it's probably because Google is still selected in your iPhone contactS Groups menu setting. Deselect it and you should only see your iCloud contacts which is the normal backup method.

How satisfying to listen to a PRO. You are simply the BEST ~ thanks !!!

You are by far one of the BEST teacher/trainer/instructors I have ever had the pleasure of dealing with. Thank you for all the lessons. I always get my "problems" solved after following your instructions!

I own a Mac, I followed this step by step, & it worked for MEeee. Thank you, thank you, thank you, I just got rid of a lot of duplicates. I bookmarked this video for future reference. Warm Regards from Reno, Nevada

Absolutely LOVE your attitude and way you teach 👏🏼 thank you!! I worked for Apple over 5 years ago for a couple years and have been wishing and hoping for a better way around this for iOS users. Having not been around the “Apple world” for several years I looked it up today to see if there was a way without the apps. And found your Chanel 😊 I’m bummed to see there isn’t a way around it just yet. I no longer own a Mac and even thought about just bringing it into the Apple store to use a Mac there- I’ll def stay away from the apps now thanks to your perfect description as to why! Thanks again!!!

One more way you can do this without giving your contacts to any one (if you have Gmail id): 1) login in to iCloud > down load all contacts in vCard format. 2) login to Gmail > go to contacts > import these contacts. 3) Wait for google to sync and show its magic. Go to merge n sync > merge all the contacts. 4) Download all the contacts in vCard (iOS format). 5) Upload the contacts to iCloud. (google on how to do this. You can use iCloud website or iPhone to do this) Simple easy safe, and you have backup in local computer and in google contacts at the end. you can delete these backups easily if you want to delete evidence. ;) ThankYou. Happy Contact merging. :)

Brilliant class as always - for Mac users, you are by far the best teacher out there. Thank you.

Good tip on archive

Brilliant! This was extremely helpful for getting rid of (or, to be more precise, merging) duplicate contacts on my Mac. Thank you!

Great step by step instruction! Thanks David!

How do the contacts on my Mac merge with the ones on my iPhone? I have way more contacts on my phone than show up on my MacBook Pro.

Thank you so much for these important and intuitive tips! Now I was able to clean up my „little mess“.😉

Great video. Definitely need a non Mac option! Got a work iPhone with lots of restrictions about how I use it and what I plug it into (but all we have at work is PCs). And outlook and work contacts constantly sync and duplicate, triplicate, quadruplicate. I’ve even had up to 5 instances of the same contact because of outlook syncing.

What a pertinent subject, David! Thanks! I bookmarked it for now. Wishing you Happy Holidays and a healthy new year!!!

David, thank you very much, very useful tips! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Cheers from Russia:)

Thanks for the info I didn’t know Mac can fix this. Btw, for someone with no Mac can download any app to fix duplicate contacts but before opening the app turn on Airplane Mode and make sure the Wifi is off then open the app and fix the duplicate contacts then remove the app and turn off Airplane Mode and Wifi back on.

Thanks for this David. It all worked perfectly on my Imac, but it hasn't synced with the I-phone. Any reason for this?

Excellent! Love the emojis! 😉

Happy I found your site! Now how do I delete my "No Last Name" list?

This was so helpful, thank you. I just switched from an android to iPhone and somehow ended up with 8-12 entries for nearly every contact after the switch. Now they’re all gone!

Thank you. I'm going to try a friend with a MAC and see if he can do this. But how do contacts on my iPhone get downloaded to the MAC?

first of all, you are a GENIUS. Second... these duplicates are still on my iphone. How do I sync them to mimic the magic that just occured on my mac???

Super helpful and worked!!!! Thank you!

Many thanks, David! Cheers...

Happy holidays David

Thanks for your excellent advice. HOWEVER, I don’t know anyone with a Mac. I thought that Apple was all about the user. Duplicate contacts is not a trivial problem and Apple needs to provide a simple solution. This is an example of why I’m staying with my Android phone. If Apple wants their devices to be black boxes, they must be perfect.

Thanks. Great teacher.

hey, thank for the video, I just moved to Mac and my contacts are all on outlook not on the Mac contact app, how do I back up the contacts before erasing the duplications? thanks a lot

not sure if you've done this before. Would you be able to show how to merge two mac accounts into one? Like let's say you have two old macs and you decided to buy a new one. How would you merge all the stuff in it?

My 80k student loan bill did teach me as much as you. Thank you.

Thanks David !

Thank you for a great, clear answer to this matter! You rock!

Please consider showing/telling me how to move all my contacts from my mid 2011 iMac (high Sierra 10.13.6) to my 2017 Macbook Air (12.1 Monterey) ?

thank you

If a person has a Mac but it’s not connected to the cloud but the iphone and iPad are, then just use the info from 3:35 onward, correct?

There is a sort of manual way on the iPhone. You can search through and when you find duplicates, you can “link contacts”. This will merge two contacts. Again, not ideal, but it’s something.

Whoa!! Thank You Soooo much!

Anita Mann…

David I have about 15000 contacts and I seriously doubt I ever connected up so many now I also see contacts which were sent as plane emails however I just can't seem to wrap my head around sorting them. Is there an easy way such as downloading all contacts, sorting them out as I would want them and uploading them back up. if so can you guide me through

I use iPhone and Mac- I did not know you can do this in Mac. However what I do is- backup all my contacts to Google OR Gmail and deduplicate from there. Hope it helps.

I despair! No mac user friends so will i have to spend me remaining end years deleting duplicates in various apps only to find out I shd have cleaned them up in icloud first?

Legend.

Hey, David! Thanks for the video, it wasl really helpful! However, I have a different problem with contacts that I can't solve - I just can't find any solution for this. So I have an iPhone for over 10 years now and started off with contact groups before using iCloud. So now I got a few contact groups on my PHONE (not iCloud) and I can't seem to delete the groups. It is just impossible. Do you have any idea how to actually do this, work around this? If so, that'd be sooo helpful! Thanks a lot in advance! Cheers, Elia

thanks for the advice for iphon/ipad users. it sucks, but at least you were honest! instead of creating the newest device we didn't know we needed it'd be great if Apple could fix this simple little problem. I would be willing to pay for an Apple program that would do this so my privacy isn't violated. (um that's if Apple doesn't sell my data to others. they don't do they?)🤣🧐

I have a Mac and when I did what you said to do the duplicates keep coming back.

Clear and concise instructions but unfortunately it didn’t work for me. I still have many duplicates. 😢

Merry Christmas

Ii followed your instruction perfectly ! t did not work. I still have multiples and now a vcard file on my desk top that wants to be imported when clicked on. What do I do????

I tried this and while it removed SOME duplicated, it did not remove then all. I found many duplicated that are identical (or appear so) and were not removed.

Another great video.. btw do you know a solution on this? On my iphone, i go into contacts and search for a name i know i have stored, but cannot find the contakt, but if i go to home screen and drag down and search, then i find the contact and can call him.. i find the contact on my mac and contacts there. ;)

What can you do to consolidate contacts on My Mac and iCloud without creating duplicates?

Thanks for your video, very helpful. The Mac Contacts app is really a poor piece of software at high school project level. The examiner would give a C+ for little effort or effectiveness. Apple should be ashamed for being responsible for it.

I didn’t get that option under export

didnt get it I want to remove duplicates from iPhone, you went directly from plugging in the phone to removing them on the Macbook. I plugged in but my laptop has its own single contacts, I cannot see the iphone ones there. I have newer contacts on my iphone so dont want to move my mac contacts to the phone. How do i solve this one ?

Could you define what a duplicate contact is and looks like? I go to Contact>Card>Look For Duplicates and my MacBook Air says I have one and then asks if I want to merge it. It does not identify what that duplicate is. I scroll down through all my contacts and cannot find one with the exact same name/names. Don't want to merge if I don't know what I am going to merge.

How do you get to "all contacts" ?

Hi,I am from the baby boom Era and found trying to learn how to use a computer and android phone very challenging. I went and had some lessons which helped to a certain degree but there are so many things I would have liked help with for example- I didn't know what username meant so I would just make some thing up and use that, as for passwords I have got a lot of them written in a book but I got locked out so many times because I didn't know what I was doing that now there are so many I don't know which one I used last and chrome has saved some but there are several different passwords for the same site. My documents, photos and things I have needed to keep are everywhere because I was worried that I hadn't put them in the appropriate place and would lose them, now I can't find them. When I attempt to find them, I have to look in samsung cloud,Dropbox, SD card, internal storage, the back up one,the Google drive and nothing is together so If someone needs a document from me I can't find it anyway. Are you laughing at my story because I am. It's such a shambles. Cheers Maria

Hi David. Great video. Question: I followed directions exactly and still have dups. It did get rid of some but not all? Also, a question, does it combine the information from each contact? For example, I may have three cards on for someone but one is professional, the other has more notes in the contact and the last is a contact card that someone else shared. So the name is exactly the same but the information inside the contact is different. Thanks for your help. LOOKING GOOD - you and your studio space.😉 Hope all is well with you and your family.

I don't know what happened, but when I ran "Look for duplicates" it duplicated every contact in my contacts now I have multiple duplicates triplicates. Can you help me?

The instructions given in this video do not work. So many of my contacts have a duplicate but the email type is different. These are not found using the duplicate finder. Is there a solution to this problem? How are these duplicates created?

Elegant & succinct, as usual. Thanks David 8•>

I guess im slow but what program on mac are u backing the files too iTunes ?

Really

Did this and still have duplicates. Not sure what I did wrong. Followed step by step and nothing worked. 🙁

my new iphone 14s now has 36,000 contacts...it created several hundred duplicates of every one of my contacts...I mean, seriously? I turned Contacts off in iCloud and "deleted" the contacts, and they are "gone" as long as one doesn't turn the iCloud Contacts back on...ridiculous. Merging did nothing...absolutely nothing.

I was able to successfully migrate my contacts from Google contacts to my iCloud contacts. However, they are not syncing with my iPhone. Any ideas what went wrong

Even mac method is not accurate, I still have many constants that are duplicated even though I did the same method. Anyone found a solution that exactly remove all duplicates?

Wow. I’ve been using iPhones and Macs for many many years. And I had no clue about the Find Duplicate feature 👍🏻 thanks

It says that I don’t have any sub when I clicked “start” please help.

Ahhh how do I tag Apple in comments?! That’ll be the next tutorial for me to look up 😶🙃😅

I'm just learning all things Apple. I don't see how this shows me to use my Mac to delete the contacts on my iPhone.

Yes @apple they need to offer a better solution

Looks like the new Mac OS removed smart groups from Contacts.

No you don’t you just need to sign into iCloud

Yes apple marketing. First put problems in your consumer's phone so that they are compelled to buy another product from the same company to resolve that. Really bad, really bad for those people who dreamt of getting an iPhone and finally got that through hardwork and then get to know they need another product to get their phone working well.

In Android, you just select the contacts and delete them ..

Bro I need delete but I can’t no one of my friends have Mac💀

to dam complicated

Government issue is like the bible concerning pistols and ivory

Hi David, Just wondering if the export to Vcard preserves group memberships? or, would I lose the relationship between a contact and the group(s) it was a member of?... Cheers, Garry.

Happy holidays David