Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
On today's episode let's look at how you can clean up your Contacts database by exporting
contacts that you may no longer need.
In your Contacts app you have all of your contacts.
Every once in a while you may want to go through them and clean them out.
After all with iCloud now these are synced across all of our different devices which
means a long list can be cumbersome if you are searching for somebody.
So, to clean them out all you need to do, of course, is to select one and then hit Delete
and it will delete that contact.
But if you are like me sometimes you want to kind of create an archive of old contacts.
Contacts that you don't think you will ever need again but it is worth taking just a little
bit of space on your Mac's hard drive to have a copy just in case.
In order to create a copy of something like that it is very easy.
All you need to do is to select it and drag to a Finder window or desktop and it creates
a simple file for that contact.
So now that I have exported this I can, with it still selected here in Contacts, delete
it and it is gone from my Contacts database.
But I still have this file here.
So what happens with this file.
I can put it in a folder somewhere called Old Contacts and chances are I might never
need them again.
But if I do how can I get access to them.
Well, if you have a VCF file, that is what these are called, that is just a single contact.
You can actually select it using Spotlight just hitting the spacebar here.
You can actually see the information inside that contact.
So I don't need to actually import back into my Contacts app.
I don't need to do anything with it or open it with anything special.
I can view the information very easily using Spotlight.
Now if I do want to bring this back into Contacts I can very easily just drag and drop it into
the list here.
I can drag and drop it into specific set here.
Yes I'm going to add that card.
Now it is added back and I can get rid of this like that.
Say I want to do this for several.
It would be great if I could select several different names there and drag and drop and
it will create three different VCF files.
But it doesn't.
It creates a combined VCF file and if I try to do that in Spotlight unfortunately I don't
get the contact information.
Now since this is mostly plain text I can open it by dragging and dropping it onto TextEdit
and you can see the information is basically there.
So I still have a way to get to it but I find it is probably better to individually drag
and drop these contacts.
So drag this one and then this one, and this one.
It doesn't take too much time and then you can go through your contacts.
Figure out which ones you want to save and then delete them and then have these individual
files here.
You do have other things that you can do as well.
For instance you can start to contact and decide to export it as a PDF and that creates
this little PDF file.
Save it here to the desktop and you can see I can look at that in Spotlight.
It looks like a little document.
The cool thing about the export to PDF is that you can actually do it very easily for
multiples.
So you can these here and export as PDF.
So it's another way to save out the information.
Doing it with a VCF file with a simple drag and drop has the advantage that you can easily
bring that contact back into your Contacts app.
Back in episode 830 I showed you how you can actually bring these contacts into Numbers
and that technique still works in Mavericks and Yosemite.
You just open up in Numbers a new document, delete the table that is there so it is just
a completely blank sheet.
You can select all or just some of the contacts, drag and drop them into Numbers and it creates
a new table with all the information there.
So you have that option there as well.
Now you also have the option to export your entire Contacts list.
Go to Export, Contacts Archive, and it will create this one file here.
But it is difficult to use this file for anything.
For instance you can't drag and drop it back in here.
If you double click on it it will simply ask if you want to replace all your contacts with
this database here.
So this is more for kind of an emergency backup type of thing than actually saving out some
data that you may want to access later.