It is increasingly difficult to keep all the contacts of friends and family in the address book of our iPhone in order. You can have a friend with whom you also communicate via Facebook and your phone number is also stored in the phone book. Maybe mom recently added a new phone number and storing it on our phonebook has been assigned a new card.
In these cases there is a high risk of having many duplicate contacts. This will create confusion in the phone book when you go looking for a contact and two or more will appear. So, how to put order in our column? Only by eliminating duplicate contacts on iPhone.
If you find yourself having too many duplicate contacts in your smartphone phonebook, in this post I will show you how to find duplicate contacts and how to merge or delete them directly from the iPhone.
If you want to avoid doing the job manually, the best and most effective way to reorganize contacts is to use a third-party app that does all the work for you. Cleaner is an excellent application that allows you to merge all the duplicate folders. Cleaner is not the only app that performs this function, there are many others that seek and combine contacts on iPhone, but this, in my opinion is the one that works best.
How to find duplicate contacts
The first thing you need to do is figure out which names, phone numbers and addresses are duplicated. With Cleaner, just a few simple steps are enough. This application will find duplicate contacts, numbers without names, emails without names and names with no phone number or email address. It can also track contacts with similar names, so if you’ve added Mario Rossi in one place and M Rossi in another, the application will mark them as duplicates so you can merge them.
All you need to do to find the duplicate data is to launch the application and authorize it to access your contacts. All duplicate data will be sorted by category (ie by phone, email, etc.). Cleaner is available for free on the App Store for iPhone and iPad with in-app purchases.
How to merge duplicate contacts on iPhone
Step 1: Back up your contacts. Before starting, click on the ” Backup ” button to save the contact file. If something happens, you will have a copy that you can import back into your device. The application will save three files, one for iCloud, one for your device and one for Facebook contacts. You can send files to yourself or save them in a compatible application such as Evernote or Dropbox.
Step 2: Tap the “Contacts” icon at the bottom of the screen. This will take you to the section that summarizes the list of the accounts you are joining, the duplicates that you have within these contacts, the filters to use to find similar contacts (like the same date of birth or the same day added), and contacts missing a field (like no name or phone number).
Step 3: Check the contacts in question to see if they are actually duplicates before merging them.
Step 4: Click on “Duplicate Contacts” to see the list of contacts that are presumably duplicated.
Step 5: Click on the name to see which other contacts the application considers a duplicate.
Step 6: Click on “New Contact” to ensure all information is correct.
Step 7: Merge contacts. You can manually merge duplicate contacts under their name by clicking “Merge Manual“, or tap the “Merge” button at the top of the screen to do it automatically. Furthermore, it is also possible to reorder the priority of the contacts.
How to delete duplicate contacts
Step 1: In “Contacts“, select duplicate phone numbers, duplicate emails, or similar names to find additional contacts that could be duplicated. You may have added your friend’s e-mail address in separate places.
Step 2: In order to delete duplicate contacts, select a contact you want to delete, then tap on the trash icon at the bottom right of the screen.
You can not delete duplicate contacts only, but you can also combine multiple contacts under one group name. For example, all my family contacts can be combined into one group under “Family”. Select the contacts you want to merge into a group and select the triangle icon at the bottom left of the screen.