Integrating contacts to one location?

enlightened · Jan 16, 2012

Hi everyone,

My contacts are all over the place! Some are in "From my PC", some are in Gmail, others in Exchange, and others in iCloud. Is there a way to get them all in one location? I've searched for apps, etc.- willing to pay for this.

I have a PC so any Mac-only solutions won't work.

Thanks in advance!

bab2010 · Jan 17, 2012

Get all your contacts into your iPhone, those sync to your iPhone from your pc are going to be the main ones since you will not be able to turn that type of contacts off. Now when adding a new email account, turn on contacts and let the iPhone sync your gmail contacts to your iPhone contacts, do the same with your exchange, your iCloud etc...
Once you are done and have all your different places contacts in the iPhone contact app, start turning them off, to turn off iCloud contacts, go to settings> icloud> contacts OFF/ there will be a notification asking you what to do with your iCloud contacts which are present in the phone, several options will be there, just select the one saying"Merge contacts",
go to your mail setting page to turn off your gmail contacts, there will also be a notification asking you to know what to do with the gmail contacts present in your iPhone, select the one saying merge...
Same to other account contacts.

enlightened · Jan 17, 2012

Any apps that would create one master group of contacts that the phone could default to? I would like to be able to see everything at once but still have some separation between work Exchange and Gmail (which is also set up as an Exchange account).

If I merge contacts as described above, where would they all merge to?

iMarilina · Jan 17, 2012

enlightened said:
Any apps that would create one master group of contacts that the phone could default to? I would like to be able to see everything at once but still have some separation between work Exchange and Gmail (which is also set up as an Exchange account).

If I merge contacts as described above, where would they all merge to?

If you wanted to have them in separate groups and interchange, you should store one group of contacts in gmail, another one in another email address and so on, and then go to settings-mails, contacts,calendars and turn on contacts, and you would have each group of contacts in the contacts.app and could choose which one you want to see, or choose ALL contacts.

Delphi51 · Jan 23, 2012

After losing mine when I gave up the Palm Pilot, I swore I would never trust any proprietary format again. I put my contacts in a plain test file. When I got my iPhone a few days ago, I emailed that text to myself, copied and pasted the list into a note on the phone. It works remarkably well; I touch a phone number in the note and a menu pops up asking if I want to call or text it.

Another idea is a free service like Evernote which stores text notes in the cloud, accessible from any computer and i devices. Those marked favorites are stored locally and available when you don't have Internet service.