And this big delete session acted as a kind of soul cleanse for me. One great advantage that I had in this was similar to what I've been doing with this last administration: saying goodbye to long time friends and associates who'd become so idiotic in their beliefs that I could no longer remain in contact with them. I spent 4 hours doing this, because the mess contained over 4,000 contacts. It also has this amazing feature that shows every contact up on top that gets highlighted, making it easier to recognize if it's a contact worth keeping or not. It's faster than my computers! And fortunately, holding down the Shift key works to highlight multiple Cards at one time. I can't emphasize this enough.įortunately (and I had no idea about this), iCloud editing is fast, like lightening instant fast. This is one of the reasons people are having all these issues, because in order to fix this whole glitch, you need to disconnect everything from iCloud and then edit iCloud. Since I never normally log into or use iCloud, I always considered my Mac Pro's Contacts to be the top hierarchy. It supersedes every other DB that is connected to it. IMPORTANT: Your iCloud database is the God Power one. So I started at the top and going through and deleting many Contacts that I had. But for me, there were still so many duplicates that weren't getting deleted and a host of other issues. For some people, they may not have to delete Cards, since the above steps may be enough. Ok, so every device should now have zero contacts (except your own I think) in the Contacts app, and nothing is syncing with iCloud.
Delete trash (not sure if that's important) and restart the computers (not sure if that's important). ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBookĭelete EVERYTHING in there. Then, on every computer, quite Contacts, and then you have to dig out and delete the entire "Address Book" folder. (Disconnect is largely done via Sys Pref: iCloud: turn off Contacts) This is important, because otherwise the devices are constantly going, "hey, someone removed Betty White contact, I better replace it with the copy iPad has!" and just mucks things up forever and ever. This is the scary part, because depending on the settings, it deletes all Cards from every device. Disconnect every device that is syncing with the iCloud account. I never ended up needing this, and it of course is filled with the nightmare of confusion, but still a good move. The other option (Archive) is f$king worthless. On my Mac, I did a backup via the File: Export: Export vCard. Apologies for the length, but I'm hoping it helps others years from now:
So here's the process that I did to end up with a shiny super fast and functional Contacts app.
the way Apple is trying to move to another system (thus breaking their archive backup).Īnyway, I had a free Sunday yesterday, and after trying to create a new card for a new colleague 4 times, and watching it disappear about 75% through the process each time, I realized it was time to do the last idea that I had for this mess: basically review all 4,000 contacts and delete any that I'd not been in contact with in the last year.
syncing with iCloud and multiple devices, and 2. The online forums are filled with tears on this issue, and it all seems to point to two basic issues: 1. Fortunately, I was able to make a sloppy back up from another source, but still the issue persisted. Took it into the Genius bar twice over the years, and both times were a mess, including one time where I made the poor Genius sweat when we realized that after deleting the database and rebuilding from the, ahem, "backup Archive" we'd just made (pro note: do not do this), every contact was absolutely gone. Sometimes 2300 cards would show up, other times 4500. Massive spinning balls, disappearing Contacts as I'm filling out a new card, 100s of duplicates that the Look For Duplicates function could not find or see (even when they were clearly the same). The Contact (fka Address Book) app has long been a pile of dung for me for at least 7 years. So to anyone dealing with this issue, I highly recommend taking the time to do these steps and get your Contact app back to operating the way it was supposed to all along) I spent so many years dealing with spinning balls that I still get shocked at Contacts' new lightning speed. (ADDED NOTE a Week Later: since this topic and post appears to have many others interested in this, I wanted to add that after 8 days of using this cleaned up Contacts, I still get a surprised thrill and jolt of joy every time I open Contacts and edit something, or add a new contact, or image, or notes, or anything else.