vCard exports that actually import cleanly

A vCard (.vcf) is the standard format for moving contacts between apps, and on a Mac it is one menu item away. Export a group, send it to a colleague or a new phone, and — often enough — it arrives damaged. Only the first contact shows up. The photos are gone. The custom labels have turned into "other". An accented name is now a row of symbols.

None of this is random. Each problem has a cause you can control before you export.

How to export from Contacts

1. Select the cards — or a group in the sidebar, then Command-A.
2. File → Export → Export vCard…
3. Save the file.

That gives you one .vcf containing all the selected cards, one after another.

Check the settings first

Open Contacts → Settings → vCard. Three options there decide what goes into the file:

• vCard format — 3.0 or 2.1. Leave it on 3.0 unless the receiving system is very old.
• Export notes in vCards — check whether it is on. Think carefully before leaving it on (more below).
• Export photos in vCards — photos make the file much larger, sometimes by ten times. Useful for a new phone, pointless for a CRM.

Why only one contact imports

A single .vcf can hold many cards. Most software reads all of them. Some — older versions of Outlook for Windows are the classic case, along with various CRMs and web forms — read the first card and stop.

There is no setting on your side that fixes this. The options are to import through something that handles multi-card files (Google Contacts does, and can then sync or export onwards), or to send one .vcf per contact.

Why characters come out garbled

vCard 3.0 files from a Mac are UTF-8. Software that assumes an older Windows code page will turn Çağlar into Çağlar.

If it happens, the importing software is the problem, not the file. Look for an encoding option on import. Exporting as vCard 2.1 sometimes helps with very old systems, because 2.1 declares its encoding explicitly for each field, but it creates other compatibility problems and should be a last resort.

Why labels and groups disappear

Custom labels. When you give a phone number a label Contacts does not offer by default — "Studio", say — it is stored using an Apple extension to the format. Other apps generally do not understand it and fall back to "other" or drop the label.

Groups. Group membership lives in your address book, not on the card, and is not part of a standard vCard export. A colleague who imports your "Suppliers" export gets the contacts, but not a group called Suppliers — they have to create it.

Linked cards. If one person appears in both iCloud and Google and Contacts shows them as a single unified card, the export may include one or both underlying cards. Cleaning up duplicates before exporting avoids sending two versions of the same person.

The field to decide on deliberately: Notes

Contact notes accumulate things nobody intended to share — personal circumstances, a negotiating position, a reminder about a difficult conversation. A vCard you send to a colleague carries every field it contains.

If you are exporting for yourself, include notes. If the file is leaving your hands, the safe default is to exclude them and include them only when you have a reason.

A checklist for a clean export

1. Remove duplicates first.
2. Decide on photos and notes in Settings → vCard.
3. Export only the cards the recipient needs.
4. Open the .vcf in a text editor and glance through it — it is plain text, and what you see is what they get.
5. If the recipient's system is unknown, ask whether it imports multi-card files.

What Compact Contacts changes

Compact Contacts works on the contacts already on your Mac and adds the review steps a clean export needs.

You can preview a selection or filtered result before exporting it as vCard or CSV, so you see what you are about to send rather than discovering it afterwards. A Saved View — say, everyone at one company with a phone number — can be exported directly as a vCard bundle for a coworker, and the same view is there next month.

Notes are excluded by default, and including them is an explicit choice for each export rather than a setting you forgot you changed.

Imports get the same treatment. Before a vCard import writes anything, you review which cards are ready, which have warnings and which are blocked, so a damaged file does not quietly land in your address book.

Everything is processed on your Mac. There is no developer contact cloud and no app account, and only a file or handoff you start yourself carries contact data outside the app.