Reviewing a contact import before it lands

Someone sends you a .vcf file with 300 contacts from a conference, a colleague's handover or an old phone. You double-click it, Contacts imports it, and within a minute every card has synced to your iPhone, iPad and any other device on the same account.

If the file was fine, that is convenient. If it was not — duplicates of people you already have, garbled names, the wrong account — the same convenience has spread the problem everywhere.

A few minutes of checking before the import is worth far more than the cleanup afterwards.

Before you import: look at the file

A vCard file is plain text. Open it in TextEdit (right-click → Open With → TextEdit), or preview it with Quick Look, and check:

How many cards. Each begins with BEGIN:VCARD. Search for it and see the count. Is it the number you expected?

Names. Do they look right, or are there garbled characters — ç instead of ç? That means an encoding problem, and importing will store the garbled version.

Which fields. Phones, emails, companies, notes. Is anything there you did not expect — or do not want in your address book?

Photos. Embedded photos appear as long blocks of text. Hundreds of them make the import larger and slower to sync.

Obvious junk. Cards with only an email address, test entries, entries for the sender's own team.

If anything looks wrong, stop here. It is much easier to ask for a corrected file than to fix 300 imported cards.

Choose where it goes

Imported contacts go into an account — iCloud, Google, Exchange or On My Mac. By default, that is usually your default account, set in Contacts → Settings → General → Default account.

Think about it before importing:

• iCloud — the cards sync to all your Apple devices immediately.
• A work account — they become your organisation's data, and possibly visible to others.
• On My Mac — stays on this Mac only. A good place for an import you are unsure about: review it there, then move the cards you want.

To import into a specific account, select that account in the sidebar first.

What Contacts does with duplicates

When an import contains cards that seem to match existing ones, Contacts usually asks what to do, offering to review the duplicates, add them anyway or skip them. Its matching is based mainly on names. It misses:

• the same person with a slightly different name spelling,
• the same person under a married or shortened name,
• two different people with the same name, whom it may treat as duplicates.

Review rather than accepting the default, and do not assume that "no duplicates found" means there are none.

Make it reversible

Export a Contacts Archive first — File → Export → Contacts Archive…. If the import goes badly, restoring the archive returns the address book to the moment before.

Put the imported cards in a group. Right after importing, the new cards are usually selected; drag them into a new group named with the date and source. If you need to remove them later, you know exactly which cards they are.

After the import

• Spot-check a handful of cards, including ones with non-English names.
• Check on your phone once synced.
• Look for new duplicates: search a few names you know were already in your address book.
• Delete the group — not the contacts — once you are satisfied, or keep it as a record of where they came from.

CSV files

Contacts can import some text and CSV files, but mapping columns to fields is where most imports go wrong: a phone number lands in the notes, or the company in the first-name field. If you have a CSV, check the column headings carefully, and import a file with only a few rows first to see where each column ends up.

What Compact Contacts changes

Compact Contacts adds a review step between the file and your address book. Before a vCard import writes anything, it shows which cards are ready, which have warnings and which are blocked, so a file with encoding problems or incomplete cards does not quietly land in your accounts. You see what is about to be written before any of it is.

After an import, the dense table with your choice of columns makes it quick to scan the new cards, Recently Edited lists what Compact Contacts saved, and field-by-field merge handles duplicates the import revealed — with encrypted on-device merge history for undo.

Contacts stay in macOS, synced by your existing accounts. There is no developer contact cloud and no app account, and contact data is processed on your Mac.