How to mass edit Contacts...

[Killerbob]

I have a lot of contacts, and it is all synced using iCloud on several Macs, iPhones and iPads.

Over time, formats have changed, or quick entries have been made, and I want to clean it all up. Going through them one at a time will take forever, and I'm hoping that someone has a suggestion on how to put them all into a spreadsheet, make the changes, and get it back into Contacts again.

I know I can export, clean up and import, but I am hoping there is a software or method that will allow me to do work directly on the contacts data.

Anyone?

 

[fwmireault]

I'm not aware of a software, I mass edited my contacts this very week and the Excel spreadsheet works just fine for that purpose

 

[Killerbob]

I'm not aware of a software, I mass edited my contacts this very week and the Excel spreadsheet works just fine for that purpose

So you 1) exported the contacts, 2) edited them in Excel, 3) deleted the contacts in Contacts, and then 4)imported the cleaned-out information? How did this process deal with contacts photos?

 

[organicCPU]

Working with vCards can be frustrating. There are too many companies, having too many own features and standards. Even just on macOS, it can be a hassle to simply export and import contacts from one macOS version to another. I didn´t find a working solution for mass editing, yet. For simple contacts without images vcfconvert might work for your workflow or could be starting point for your own scripting. Maybe there are better such tools with image support, but I don´t know any.

Image handling should be quite simple, as images are plain text strings encoded in base64 format. It´s not a big deal to take a jpeg and convert it to that string, but Apple and Microsoft do have small differences. A contact generated with Microsoft Outlook usually has a working image in Apple Contacts, but unfortunately not vice versa. It should also be possible to write a script that extracts all image strings from a bunch of .vcf files and one that after editing assigns the images back to their proper contacts.

Also consider not to convert to csv/Excel at all and just mass edit you .vcf file with the sed command line utility, e.g. that should be sufficient to delete notes from contacts in batch with a single Terminal command.

Please report back your experiences here.