[Q] Merging contacts from Phone, Facebook, Google, etc into 1 single contact on phone - General Questions and Answers

I'm trying to figure out how I can reliably merge all the duplicate contacts I have to a single contact on the phone. What I'm trying to achieve is to be able to have:
1) 1 Single contact per person (not "linked" or "joined" but one single contact)
2) combine replace the older pictures with newer ones
3) Pull Facebook ID for use with Contacts-sync (so I can get 720x720 contact pictures instead of whatever the facebook app pulls)
Example: If i have 4 Joe Smith contacts (1 on the phone, one from facebook [i know, it's not editable], one from google, and one from contacts sync), I want to be able merge them all so that there is only 1 Joe Smith contact that has all the information from all 4 contacts so I can unsync facebook and google out of it.
I want to be able to pull the facebook ID number for the contacts so it can resync the picture as needed as well as reduce the clutter that I have.
Why? Facebook's current concept in syncing "existing contacts" seem to be the same thing as sync ALL contacts. It downloads ALL my friends info from Facebook and puts it in there but hides it. I'd prefer to be able to just get info for those people who is on my phone contacts and no one else.
I also want less syncing happening on my phone. As of this posting, Facebook still downloads low res pictures and ignores its own sync rules.
Does anyone here have any suggestions as what I can do to merge the info I need so I can unlink Facebook and just have contacts-sync pull the photos instead?
Thanks!
P.S: for those who are using the XDA app and can't see my signature, this is on the Samsung Galaxy S3 i9300 (International) phone.

Related

Google Contacts: a true mess!

I've decided to go "All Google" after having had two different Android phones and getting Gmail, but finding it horribly fustrating trying to follow Googles way of doing things.
1. All my phone contacts are stored on the phone, not as Google Contacts.
- In the "People" view on my Legend I only show "Phone" contacts.
- There is no way to move phone contacts to Google Contacts
2. I exported all phone contacts to a file and imported these into Google/Gmail contacts
- Viewing both Phone contacts and Google Contacts doubles up a lot of my contacts.
- A solution is linking these, but this only helps with the view on the phone, not the whole Google contact eco-system
- All info stored on the Phone contact, doesn't get imported into Google Contacts.
- All contacts imported are stored in "My Contacts"
- I only sync "My Contacts" with my Android phone, as the others contain people I will never ever call (example: Ebay seller)
- Now choosing only to show Google Contacts on my Legend looses picture information I have stored on my Phone Contact
3. I also use Picasa (and this is where it gets tricky)
- I have created People in Picasa and tagged thousands of pictures.
- I now have "Person A" created in Picasa and I have "Person A" in Gmail Contacts and on my Adroid phone.
- When logged into Web Albums, I select "Sync with contacts....." on "Person A" in Picasa.
- I then get "Person A" in "My Contacts" and two "Person A" in my "All Contacts".
- When I merge these two contacts, it removes it from "My contacts" and keeps one in "All contacts".
- This means "Person A" is removed from my Android phone since this is the folder I sync with it.
I think this is a mess..............it's holy fustrating!
Basically, I'm inquiring how you people use or have set up your Contacts and whats the best way to get a unison Contacts information?
I ran to a similar problem when I switch to a Google phone. I had to export my phone contacts, upload them to Google contacts and then one by one sort and organized them. It took me a week but once done its nice I can switch from one Android to another and my contacts will be safe.
Sent from my HTC Evo 4g 2.2 (Rooted)
What i think its contact is messy is it shows only one big group- Google contact
I sort them well in the Google contact but i can't see any groups in my phone
I have so many groups of people it is so hard to find them...
I deleted all contacts from my phone. Imported them in Google and manage them in Google.
For extra keepsake, every once in a while, I backup all my contacts to a vCard file that I keep on my PC and in my email.

Edit Contacts Nightmare

Somehow my new Inspire synced with facebook, google, outlook (I guess) I have five or six entries for everyone. I linked some of them, but is there an easier way to get rid of the duplicates?
volumnus said:
Somehow my new Inspire synced with facebook, google, outlook (I guess) I have five or six entries for everyone. I linked some of them, but is there an easier way to get rid of the duplicates?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Faced with the same issue, I deleted all my phone contacts, removed the contacts sync on all my accounts, and then restored my previously exported up phone contacts backup.
And since the google contacts where all synced earlier, when I compose any email, it still prompts for emails from the previously synced contacts.
Best for u could be to take off the linking. Linking contacts messed up big time for me changing the display names, and not reverting to the one already on phone.
Go into your People app and touch Menu, choose View. Now remove checks from any account which you don't want your contacts displayed. I only have my Google contacts displayed (and have Facebook for HTC Sense only syncing with contacts in my address book for contact pictures). All other accounts (2 exchange, phone, sim, ect) are unchecked so i don't see these duplicates
I spent about two hours linking them all.
Now they only show up as one contact. It seems to be working ok so far. Will this slow down the phone, having so many duplicate, linked contacts?
I had exact same problem as you. What I did:
1. Made every contact show up (google sync, facebook, etc.)
2. Deleted ALL duplicates.
3. Saved to SD Card.
I never had a problem afterwards. I use google as a backup just in case though
I also believe that the duplicates are unnecessary, so I delete them, because I had like 4-5 duplicates for each contact.
Get GO contacts from market. Good app to manage contacts. I had 3000 "contacts" ... Came down to actual value of 200 using the app.
Sent by Skeletor from Castle of Greyskull using XDA Premium App

[Q] Backup linked contacts

Hi,
I love trying out all the different ROM's for my desire S, but I am getting slightly frustrated with having to re-link all of my contacts after flashing to a new ROM!
Is there a way I can backup linked cantacts so when I again register my ActiveSync, Facebook, Gmail and phone accounts and contacts they are linked together nicely again!
Many Thanks
Campbs
campbs said:
Hi,
I love trying out all the different ROM's for my desire S, but I am getting slightly frustrated with having to re-link all of my contacts after flashing to a new ROM!
Is there a way I can backup linked cantacts so when I again register my ActiveSync, Facebook, Gmail and phone accounts and contacts they are linked together nicely again!
Many Thanks
Campbs
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Where is you're primary contact source, for example, mine is google contacts and I find that the contacts linkage data is stored within the google contact info field within <HTCData><Facebook>id:999999999/friendof:8888888</Facebook></HTCData>. This then means whenever I then add additional accounts, eg FB etc only the contacts links that I've said NO to in the past are re-prompted for? as the linkage data in the google.contact.info field is automatically applied
So possible add the Google Account and get google contacts first when setting up your device. Does that make sense?
ben_pyett said:
Where is you're primary contact source, for example, mine is google contacts and I find that the contacts linkage data is stored within the google contact info field within <HTCData><Facebook>id:999999999/friendof:8888888</Facebook></HTCData>. This then means whenever I then add additional accounts, eg FB etc only the contacts links that I've said NO to in the past are re-prompted for? as the linkage data in the google.contact.info field is automatically applied
So possible add the Google Account and get google contacts first when setting up your device. Does that make sense?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
how do I know which one is the primary?
kyogoku said:
how do I know which one is the primary?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sorry I made that term up, what I meant is which source do you keep the most contacts in and keep up to date, Google contacts, Outlook or FB?
That source I called primary as it is ultimately where your contacts reside, the others are simply places that the same contacts are in...and can add value to your initial records....
I add my google account first so that I get all my real contact (my friends) and then only sync the other accounts to where I have an existing user, so that my contact list is not filled with 100's of unnecessary people, just my friends contact records have extra data added to them.
See this post related to contacts that might be of use

[Q] Let's handle (or at least clarify) the editing facebook contacts problem.

Greetings
I have had it just about enough of this Facebook virus and the contact importing in Android in general. What is the point of importing something if we have absolutely no control over deleting any of it?
The basic question is: How can I delete -some- contacts out of the imported Facebook contacts? Not how to delete all of them, not how to only show the ones with phone numbers, not how to merge them with other contacts.
Furthermore, please don't just answer "You can't.". At least not without explaining why exactly it is not humanly possible.
I have a rooted (xperia mini pro) phone, and I would like to reasearch just where and how are these uneditable contacts stored, and how to strike down on them with great vengeance and furious anger.
__________
What I suspect happens is, for instance, Skype downloads its own contacts and stores them for itself (because it needs them), and then Andorid reads these contacts and just displays them in the phonebook. So if we would want extra filtering functionality for skype contacts in the phonebook, we'd have to write our own phonebook app.
However, in Facebook's case, it does not need those stored contacts for anything other than this syncing functionality. Which means, what we could do is, access wherever this offline fb contact database is, and manually delete what we don't want to have. Right? then, when the phonebook app reads the fb contacts, it will just find the ones we care about.
Is that right?
+1 for any educated answers.

[Q] Att Edge makes duplicate contacts when synced with Google contacts

Help, my att Note Edge creates multiple duplicate contacts when it syncs with my Google Contact account (my phone's contacts list shows 2,500 contacts
where as my google contacts shows only 280 contacts - which is the correct number of contacts). Also I get a notification message saying that Sync was
unsuccessful because "Too many Contacts deleted. There are 1019 deleted items for Contacts, account ....... @gmail.com. What do you want to do?" Do any
of you have a fix for this problem? thanks
I only know how to manually link them. Open one and look for the chain link you're icon, it will suggest similar name's you check them and click done and they're then all grouped. Kind of a pain you have to do each one but it's effective for multiple contracts.

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