Edited 8/24: The new gmail changed this guide and I have attempted to update it. Since my contacts were so clean from when I first wrote this guide, I can't say it's 100% perfect, like it was . I would really like it if people could chime in suggestions for the community!
Please note, this was in the Sticky. In an effort to save a LOT of needed space in the sticky AND to allow new
suggestions I am making this thread. Please let me know if this helps, and if there are other ways to clean up the contacts. Apologies, but I absolutely hate Facebook so others will need to chime in on how to incorporate that, if needed. Alright, on with my guide:
EDIT YOUR CONTACTS (ON YOUR PC FIRST)
If you are new to Android, the first time you logged in it was probably amazing (and frustrating) when you saw ALL of your google contacts sync with your phone.
First things you need to know, google does not allow you to stop the auto-adding of the random people you email to your contacts. Of course, those randoms are now likely showing up in your contact list (hence the frustrating part). Here is how I fixed it:
*please note, if you hide all contacts who do not have a phone number (see below) you can likely skip this, but I included for those who REALLY want to clean up their contacts*
1 - Login to gmail on your PC. Click on "Contacts" on the left border.
2 - Notice you have "My Contacts" (the good) and you have "All Contacts" below that (the bad).
*EDIT* There is no longer a "All Contacts." Google has improved this to now have "Other Contacts." This makes weeding out the people you may not want in your contacts a LOT easier. The next few steps was a workaround that is no longer needed. Simply review these "Other Contacts" and delete those you do not want, and add the ones you do to "My Contacts."
3 - go to the "search contacts" search bar and just enter one SPACE and then press enter.
4 - The middle column will now have your contacts sorted by THE GOOD (My contacts) on top and then THE BAD (All Contacts) below that. You may have more tiers, but I am keeping it simple for illustration.
5 - Scroll all the way down to the bad list. Review the names. Some may be legit people you just have not added to your My Contacts list yet.
6 - If you have a hard time recalling who someone is, you can click on their name and then click on the link "view recent conversations." This shows any previous email exchanges so you can decide to either delete or add them.
7 - Work through this list. I would suggest deleting them as you go, but not adding them to your My Contacts list until the very end (to prevent from having to do step 3 over and over). To add a contact to your "My Contacts" I just click on their name, edit their info and it showed up automatically. I did not need to click anything like "Add to...." etc.
8 - Okay, great. Lets assume you got rid of all the clutter. NOW, go to your My Contacts.... click on the "More Actions" button and then "Find & Merge Duplicates". If you have any, fix them... no reason to have several entries for the same person.
9 - Now just review the My Contacts list and make any edits or format changes. I am Type A, so you could only imagine how clean your Android Contact list is about to appear.
Great, enough with the PC. Go to your Vibrant.
Chances are it is already synching up with the changes you made.
The phone came with a bunch of #s stored on the Phone and SIM stock, I could care less about these. If you agree:
1 - Open Contacts. Press menu, go to "Display Options"
2 - Uncheck Phone and SIM (others may not agree, I just dont see the point), leaving Google as the only one checked.
*Also* You can also Delete these by long-pressing on them (wish I believe I did, and then unchecked them to now show... of course, they were deleted, so....)
Alright, almost there now. As it is, you have removed a LOT of clutter, but you may still have a ton of contacts. That is because, by default the Contacts app shows All contacts, even if they do not have a phone number. Now again, this is a personal choice.... but if I need to call someone, I would rather not have to deal with people listed who I do not have a phone number for. Also, if I am emailing them, I am using gmail, not Contacts (so again, not needed). IF you agree:
1 - Open Contacts, Press Menu and go to "Display Options."
2 - The top will say something to the affect of, check here if you only want to show contacts with phones.... Click it. Then click Done.
3 - Bam, your Contacts may not be perfect (like mine), but I bet they look a ton better. I tried to point out there is a lot of personal preferences, so please take this with a grain of salt. I like things clean.
Please read the sticky for other tips/tricks for contacts AND many other topics. Thanks for everyone helping!
You're the best. Thanks.
Great, thanks for this!
If only I'd seen it before muddling through the new contacts screens for hours getting it to work it would have saved me a lot of time.
Only comment is that step 3:
"go to the "search contacts" search bar and just enter one SPACE and then press enter."
Doesn't seem to work on the new gmail contacts screen, when I do this search it just takes me to the my contacts page. I had to click 'older contact manager' link at the bottom of the screen and then do the blank search. Also step 4, with the new interface you don't get the middle columns. Any ideas on how you'd sort the contacts with the new interface? I'm not sure how long the link to the old contacts manager will be around for...
Thanks for taking the time to draw this up.
Another great "clean up" tool is Merge contacts. After updating my Treo contacts into gMail, Find dups was not enough.
Merge is more of a manual action, but it is great to look at the entire list to see whats going on.
At the same time, "groups" is another manual action that can help organize "YOUR" (good list) contacts. At times, I had contacts lists from other peoples PDAs and phones on my treo (mine was reliable, theirs', not so much, so when they crashed and lost their contacts, i could beam their list to them).
Hope I helped someone
Anyone know how to get facebook pics to show up for contacts? When I first got this phone all my contacts who are on my facebook had their pics synced up. Not anymore though, and idk why. Fb still syncs in the updates column but not their pics.
Anyway, thanks for the guide.
The way I found that works is to follow the above instuctions (other than that I kept both the gmail friends as well as all my facebook friends and then chose to display only those with a phone.) You can then go through each contact without a photo and click on it (the one without a photo). This is the gmail contact, choose "link contact" and the Facebook contact comes up (note that this method assumes that your favorite contacts are also on facebook with a photo, if not you will need to get your own picture with your phone or camera). Again, this is assuming you have your contact as a facebook friend AND a gmail email friend.
I hope this makes sense. Good Luck
Hey, thanks for the comments. Yeah... The new gmail changed this guide and I need to update it. Will try and work on it soon. If you guys can keep making recommendations that would be awesome.
Do you know of a way to *remove* all SIM contacts on the phone? When transferring from my old phone I dumped to SIM and then loaded onto the Android device, then I dumped that to a CSV and merged it with gmail. That got things sorted out on the gmail end, however I now have a bunch of redundant SIM contacts.
Even if you uncheck SIM contact visibilityin the contact app, they do still exist, and they show up elsewhere. So far I've seen no way to actually get rid of all of them easily, short of manually removing them one at a time
I also like using the app "Contacts clean-up" to auto format all the numbers up be consistent. ;-)
Sent from my Samsung Vibrant
Jeremy, did you see if there were duplicates on the pc within gmail?
Sent from my Vibrant
Okay, I made an attempt to correct my guide for the new Gmail. I really did not have much to play with this time, so please let me know if there needs to be any changes or improvements made.
Thank you guys!
Remember the days?
Did anyone else make a complete different Phone list within google contacts, and only use this list as the list for your phone? This was on my G1.
I'm trying to figure out why we can't do that anymore. Kinda sucks
s15274n said:
Jeremy, did you see if there were duplicates on the pc within gmail?
Sent from my Vibrant
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No dupes in gmail itself, just the dupe sim contacts. Gmail did a good job handling the dupes that I had in my gmail account.
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App
Related
Can I exclude some contacts or better yet remember the category view.I want to exclude the tons of people I email but don't call often from the sync to my wm5/8525 or is there a way to get my contacts display to remember the category's i want to exclude.
Every time I close out the contacts all the contacts go back to the huge list, then i have to go back to exclude or just picking the category i want then pick the person or contact.
I don't want to maintain 2 separate contact lists and I don't see an option to exclude a contact from the sync..or to get wm5 to rember the category view after I close it.
thanks guys
Tiffany
This May Not Be A Full Solution
There's a third-party software out there that manages your contacts. I don't know if you can selectively sync, but it does have the "remember last category viewed" feature.
Download the Inesoft Address Book here:
http://handheld.softpedia.com/get/Business/Address-book/Inesoft-Address-Book-12795.shtml
I've never used it so caveat emptor. Has anybody out there used it before?
Thanks,
WASSIM
Like the title says. Anyway to import all of your facebook contacts to the phones address book?
In the bottom of every contact (editing mode), you have a selection for this. You have to do this on every contact ..
Cheers for replying!. I figured that was the only way to do it (the hard and long way!). Took me about 10mins to finish it, though much happier now its done.
The facebook integration is pretty cool
Yes it is. I wish there was a easier way to add the FB info. But when your done, its pretty cool
On the people tab you go
All People > Updates and Events (face & clock tab)
you should have an item at the top "link profiles" where it will match up your local contacts against your facebook contacts.
Tick all that apply (well default is ticked, so detick those who you don't want to join) and click OK.
All of your facebook contacts linked at once.
mr_Ray said:
On the people tab you go
All People > Updates and Events (face & clock tab)
you should have an item at the top "link profiles" where it will match up your local contacts against your facebook contacts.
Tick all that apply (well default is ticked, so detick those who you don't want to join) and click OK.
All of your facebook contacts linked at once.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Is this with an empty updates and events list? I can't see the option now the list has the entries I added in manually!
Luapo said:
Is this with an empty updates and events list? I can't see the option now the list has the entries I added in manually!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Once I added all mine the option disappeared. De-link a few people if you want to try it out.
Just tried it, the phone only found one link! Oh well, i'm guessing that might be down to how the names are formatted on the phone and in facebook?
Luapo said:
Just tried it, the phone only found one link! Oh well, i'm guessing that might be down to how the names are formatted on the phone and in facebook?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Possibly. Not sure how it makes the matches.
mr_Ray said:
On the people tab you go
All People > Updates and Events (face & clock tab)
you should have an item at the top "link profiles" where it will match up your local contacts against your facebook contacts.
Tick all that apply (well default is ticked, so detick those who you don't want to join) and click OK.
All of your facebook contacts linked at once.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks ! But it only finds ta few of the contacts this way.
Of some reason 11 of 76 was found and the rest must manually be added
scrabble8 said:
Thanks ! But it only finds ta few of the contacts this way.
Of some reason 11 of 76 was found and the rest must manually be added
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
As great as the HD2 is, no phone as yet attained the ability to read your mind. Seems a decent sample size - did you notice a pattern in those that did/didn't auto match? Full name, email, phone number, etc. not matching?
It would be good to know how it's doing the matching, I've got a deady mix of being curious as to how it works ye being too lazy to de-link and subtlely modify some contacts.
MSN Live tip
Ive added all 700 FB contacts.. open MSN Messenger and within there is an option to add all FB Contacts.. then sign in on MSN on ya phone goto live and merge contacts ;-)
mr_Ray said:
As great as the HD2 is, no phone as yet attained the ability to read your mind. Seems a decent sample size - did you notice a pattern in those that did/didn't auto match? Full name, email, phone number, etc. not matching?
It would be good to know how it's doing the matching, I've got a deady mix of being curious as to how it works ye being too lazy to de-link and subtlely modify some contacts.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hehe.... thats true !
In my case, all the contact wasnt exactly as the FB profiles. I imported contacts from iPhone. And in the process some of the contact were listed as Lastname, Firstname. FB couldnt match the profiles then
Raising this thread up again.. I have some question re. the contact photo.
I have about 450 - 500 contacts. Roughly 150 of these have photos stored in Outlook that I'm quite happy with. Doing a Facebook link-up matches about 250 of these accounts. Some of these 250 linked accounts already had photos I liked. Still with me so far?!
Now I know you can go into each contact individually and select whether to use their Facebook picture or Outlook picture, but is there a way to set this behaver by default? My preference would be to use the Outlook one by default, unless there isn't one in which case to use the Facebook one. Surely this "wish" must be quite common?!
Also, is there a way pull said Facebook photos over to Outlook, so as they are stored and pop up on my laptop Outlook etc? I used a 3rd party app a year or so ago (hence the pictures in Outlook already) and while I could use this again it seems silly to have to do the link-up twice!!
Thanks in advance..
Is there a way to sync all my contacts with facebook in one go instead of having to go into each individual contact and link to facebook ?? thanks
im not sure if this will work but worth a try
go to contacts in Sense
click ALL people
See the grey icons along the bottom? slide across to Updates and Events
Now somewhere in hear it listed all my contacts that it had matched with Facebook itself (i think) and gave a load of tickbox's to confirm that I wanted to match them. You might have to do a little snooping around but it was defo here somewhere....
Good luck!
Monty Burns said:
im not sure if this will work but worth a try
go to contacts in Sense
click ALL people
See the grey icons along the bottom? slide across to Updates and Events
Now somewhere in hear it listed all my contacts that it had matched with Facebook itself (i think) and gave a load of tickbox's to confirm that I wanted to match them. You might have to do a little snooping around but it was defo here somewhere....
Good luck!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i have the same question, so i tried what you sugested but when i go to that tab it says no updates. i have logged in with the facebook application, manually linking works.
Sorry guys, I only stumbled across it today ...... and now I can't find it again.
ok , something strange is happening.....
i went into where suggest and did the update , there were initially 4 contacts already in there for some reason, then after the update there were five of my mates.
however, all the others seemed to have linked as well on their own as peoples FB photos are now in my contact list ?!
strange , but somehow it seems to have worked
Monty Burns said:
im not sure if this will work but worth a try
go to contacts in Sense
click ALL people
See the grey icons along the bottom? slide across to Updates and Events
Now somewhere in hear it listed all my contacts that it had matched with Facebook itself (i think) and gave a load of tickbox's to confirm that I wanted to match them. You might have to do a little snooping around but it was defo here somewhere....
Good luck!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just went to contacts-updates it then showed in updates how many names had been matched to profiles
How exactly do I do this? If i go into updates it only has me with my facebook messages and requests.
Really would like to sync numbers as I cba to do them 1 by 1!
worth noting here that the info that tells the phone the contact is also facebook linked is written to the 'notes' field of the contact card, meaning that solong as you have synced your contact list with a service that takes all available fields, (pretty sure most do, i use outlook 2007) the facebook links will still be set when you do a hard reset and restore the contacts, so you never need to link them again. Just log in yourself to facebook and the links are all there in teh contact list already.
(It also strangely seems to hold the ones that are set as favourite people that way too, your quick people links are re populated after a hard reset too)
Is there some sort of application that allows me to link contacts to facebook pages from my computer, and then somehow mass updates the contacts on the phone? The link to facebook is just some XML in the contact notes, so in principle this should be possible.
The same question has been asked here yesterday - i can't post the link as there is a restriction from doing so *rubbish* but it's topic id is 636175 and isn't too far down the forum...
Anyways, it apparently works with myphone, but I don't seem the XML that everyone else does for some reason and so my facebook links don't save
wingm4n said:
Is there some sort of application that allows me to link contacts to facebook pages from my computer, and then somehow mass updates the contacts on the phone? The link to facebook is just some XML in the contact notes, so in principle this should be possible.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
when you sync back your contacts after a flash/hard reset, the data to link them to their facebook equivalents should already be there. However, the links won't start to work until you have reassigned your 'me' contact card to your facebook account. When you do that, you should find the facebook links are restored. (not the facenbook app)
i'm afraid that's not what i'm looking for, myphone backs up my contact facebook associations just fine, i'm just looking for a simpler way to create those associations in the first place, preferably through the computer
Sorry if I misunderstand you, but doesn't the people/facebook app pop up and say 'click here to associate your contacts' and most of them are already pre-checked?
Note I'm NOT talking about the one on an individual person's page, but the one on the 'all people' list.
In the two seconds that process takes, 80% of my contacts were covered. The other 20% being people who I have as 'Jon XYZ' but they are 'Jonathan XYZ' on FB (or vice-versa.)
Or are you one of those people who doesn't do first name/last name and is looking for a way to get around that?
that's exactly what i need! it didn't do that with me, is there a way launch that synchronization manually?
I'm... not sure. I'm sure there is but I don't know how.
Just to make sure you're not missing anything obvious:
Go to the People tab
Click All People at the bottom
You're now at the "All" tab within a new screen -- you should see your fb contact as "Me" listed as the second contact -- do you see this 'link your facebook contacts' around here? (If it exists on this screen, it'll be one of the top three contacts.)
If not, use the slider on that same screen to scroll over to 'Updates and Events'. You'll see yourself at the very top here, and I'm almost positive that it was on this screen where it had 'link your contacts.' It wasn't in a menu or anything, it was very prominently displayed as one of the top items.
When/if you can find that screen, it's basically a dumb match that looks for Contacts(First Name,Last Name) = Facebook(First Name,Last Name). I'm not sure if it pairs on email address, but AFAIK it needs the full name to be exactly the same.
HTH.
**This all assumes you entered your facebook credentials when setting up your phone (or from the data sync menu under the settings tab afterwards) - completely separate from any fb app you may have on your phone. I'm pretty sure you have done this since you mentioned the XML in the contacts but just to be absolutely positive.
I've been looking at this problem since you first posted, and the main problem I see is that I can't see a way to un associate the me contact from face book (in order to re associate so that the contact association screen comes up)
dashed annoying!
i see what you mean, i'm going to look for a way to do that
Have you tried Fonebook!
http://www.developingtrends.co.uk/Software/Facebook/Fonebook/Default.aspx
I can do all the sync with facebook and Outlook. Give a look at this!
samsamuel said:
I've been looking at this problem since you first posted, and the main problem I see is that I can't see a way to un associate the me contact from face book (in order to re associate so that the contact association screen comes up)
dashed annoying!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think you could momentarily switch off the Facebook connection altogether do accomplish that. It's under "Data services" (on the settings tab).
Robrecht said:
I think you could momentarily switch off the Facebook connection altogether do accomplish that. It's under "Data services" (on the settings tab).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yea, thanks, that got it, however when i logged back in (through 'me' contact card) it doesnt ask about associations as when you do it the first time. Oh well.
i just found an option do associate the contacts for you! if u scroll to the contacts tab in HTC sense then scroll to updates and events (its the picture of the person with a clock next to their head) i had a button at the tob which said 'Associate contacts: XX new associations found (xx being the number of new associations)' tap this and select the contacts you want to update (by default it selects all) then tap ok. it will create the associations for any contacts that arnt associated. it will also set the default contact picture to the facebook profile. it will make your contacts lag a bit while it downloads the info but after that it runs fine
if it helps im running 1.66 official hd2 rom from HTC, with radio 2.08
mazzarin said:
Or are you one of those people who doesn't do first name/last name and is looking for a way to get around that?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sorry to reopen this thread, but I'm one of those people! I would also be interested in finding a way to add/backup my fb associations on the PC as MyPhone does not seem to sync them for me I get the fb id's in the <sn> field but not in the <facebook> ones =/
I'm new to Android, so I don't know if my question is specific to Streak, or a general Android question.
In my Streak contacts, I have both Facebook and Google contacts, many of which I have merged. I've noticed that whichever contact I select first, that is the name of the merged result. If I change the listbox at the top left to my Google mail address or to Facebook, I can see the contacts with their unmerged names.
This kinda makes sense, but took me a while to suss as it's not documented properly.
What I can't do, however, is unmerge. How do I do that? Sometimes the contacts have slightly different names (e.g. Johnathan in FB and John in Google). If I want to choose which is displayed, it would seem I'd have to unmerge somehow, and the remerge selecting the right one first.
The only thing I can think that might work is to delete one of the contacts, then re-sync. I don't want to risk deleting anyone completely though, so if anyone has found a better unmerge method -- let me know!
I got really fed up with three stock contacts app pretty quickly, so I know use phonebook2.0 much better solution and free
Sent from my Dell Streak using XDA App
Cheers for that Fards... it seems a very useful app!