Remove Duplicate Contacts from a Mac quickly and easily
Quickly find Duplicate Contacts...
Duplicate Scan with the options you need...
... and find the hidden Duplicates
Auto-merge
or Drag and Drop to merge by hand
Fix multiple fields and other problems
Graphical Display of Group Membership
*** Contact Clearout was a MacWorld App of the Week ***
Removing duplicate contacts should be easy and safe. Over time your Mac Contact List just accumulates rubble and junk. Or a slew of duplicate contacts can appear overnight. The first thing is to remove the identical duplicates, that’s the easy part. A good duplicate app should do much more.
Recurring Duplicate Contacts
Suddenly your Mac Contact List is growing in size with duplicate contacts – maybe multiple duplicates. You clear them out and they come straight back.
Usually the problem is synching to multiple address book accounts. Clearout apps are designed to let you see what is being duplicated and where, before you delete anything. This isn’t just to give you confidence that nothing is being lost, it is a vital diagnostic tool.
Hidden Duplicate Contacts
After you have cleared out the normal ‘identical’ duplicate contacts, there will still be hidden duplicates. These hidden duplicate contacts are the ones more likely to cause problems.
Both Contact Clearout and Contact Duplicates apply heuristic rules to suggest contacts that are different but might really be the same person.
They are typically created when you enter a contact twice at different times. For example, a phone number into your phone – which gets synched back, and an email address from your email client. Not only do these entries push up the size of your address book, but when you search for a person, you may only see one of the entries. This will waste your time while you try to find that missing phone number again.
Data Formatting and Corruption
As well as duplicate contact problems there can be mistakes or corruptions in the individual entries.
Duplicated fields in a contact makes the entry confusing and messy. Fields can be placed in the wrong section. Your database may be cluttered with blank or empty fields. The Clearout apps will scan each all of the data to suggest auto-fix options or just to highlight possible misplaced information.
What the users say…
Contact Clearout for full control of your Address Book
Group Matrix
Contact Clearout gives you a visual overview of group memberships. By sorting on groups you can get a picture of group membership patterns. A single click will move a contact in or out of a group.
Health Check for your contacts
Clearing all this up properly involves more than just the traditional duplicate search.
Important: Before you start – always back up your contacts. Even if individual restore is possible – just going back to where you started is a good option to have in reserve.
Your eyes are the best at spotting out of date or mangled contacts. So, unless you have a very large number of contacts, do a visual scan of all your contacts (Contact Clearout is designed to make this stage as quick and fluid as possible with ‘no click’ mouse rollover).
After the backup and visual scan it’s time for that standard search for identical duplicate contacts – remove or link identical and similar contacts. Ideally you would keep a backup of the deleted contacts – mistakes always happen!
After the conventional scan there is one more thing to do – get rid of those dangerous near contacts – Contact Clearout will help you look for and merge contacts that might be for the same person but have different information.
If you use groups, you might want to check them and to look at how you are using them.
Never remove duplicates that are on different sources (On My Mac, Google, iCloud etc.) because depending on your setup, subsequent syncing may remove all the copies. Let the Apple Contacts app make them into linked contacts. None of our apps will do this unless you explicitly configure them.
The Clearout family of apps are designed to make this process as fast and as simple as possible. They will find identical duplicates and suggest possible matches. They will let you scan at speed through your contacts with just a mouse movement or scroll. Contact Clearout provides tools for visually analyzing group membership. All the apps work with Yosemite and El Capitan. Address Book Clearout also supports legacy systems.
Recovering deleted contacts
Over the years we’ve seen lots of e-mails from people wanting to recover contacts they have accidentally deleted. All the Clearout apps will keep archive copies of any deleted contacts so you can always recover any lost information – just because mistakes can always happen!
The Best Mac OS X Duplicate Contact Manager
We think our Clearout family of apps are the best for Mac OS X Address Book management. All our apps are designed to deal with all these issues. Duplicate contact searching goes beyond finding identical duplicate contacts and will suggest similar contacts for you to review and merge. Nothing is deleted without you having the chance to see where things are going wrong. Everything can be undone and all deleted contacts are held in an archive so you can restore them. Years of experience with Mac Contact list management software has gone into these apps.
The two Clearout apps also let you scan through your contacts by just rolling the mouse over the list. This is the fastest way to look at your contacts. Your eyes are the best tools for finding out of date or mangled entries.
These are the main common features of these apps. (See the products page for a comparison matrix.)
Go on! Tell someone.