iPhone 12 Pro Contacts

[confucious]

Not sure which forum to post this in, but my contacts are screwed.
I have two iPads and an iPhone and all synch contacts with my hotmail and iCloud accounts but the contacts are different on all three devices.
On my iPhone I have many multiple contacts for the same person (and I mean many) but when I went to do my Christmas cards I had to look on all three devices to find addresses.
How can I
A) get all my devices in synch and
B) clear the old/duplicate records.
Any ideas?

Thanks.

Conf.

 

[eyoungren]

Not sure which forum to post this in, but my contacts are screwed.
I have two iPads and an iPhone and all synch contacts with my hotmail and iCloud accounts but the contacts are different on all three devices.
On my iPhone I have many multiple contacts for the same person (and I mean many) but when I went to do my Christmas cards I had to look on all three devices to find addresses.
How can I
A) get all my devices in synch and
B) clear the old/duplicate records.
Any ideas?

Thanks.

Conf.

I would suspect that despite your contacts being hotmail, any time you created a new contact on your iPad or iPhone the group that the contact defaulted to was iCloud. Apple does that by default and if you don't pay attention to it the contact ends up not being added to your intended contact provider. Then you have the problem you are having.

One way to manage this would be to go to iCloud.com and export all your iCloud contacts. Then you'd go over to your hotmail account (on the web) and import the file that you got from iCloud.com. If hotmail has an option to manage duplicates then I'd use that afterwards. Then just make sure you set iOS to use hotmail as your preferred contact provider.

 

[rambo47]

I had a similar problem some years back. Wen I synced my contacts to multiple cloud services, small differences in how they were formatted made them look like new/different contacts. I went with iCloud as my only sync service but I had to manually clean everything up. It was a multi-day pain in the butt, however once I streamlined my sync it never happened again.