Background: I've been idly wanting to switch to Google Contacts for years (namely, since I got my first G1 when Android launched), but back then their system was abysmal and the contact importer choked on importing my address book EVERY time. So as of right now, I have no contacts set up in Google -- everything is local on my Mac.
It seems like things are a lot better with Google Contacts these days (especially with regard to how they organize things -- remember when it used to be contact cards for every person you ever emailed?), so now I'm wondering whether it's possible to use Address Book / OS X's built-in Google Contacts syncing to push out my desktop contacts to Google -- or whether I still have to do an Address Book export to Google Contacts import in order to get my contacts off my Mac and onto Google. (I haven't yet tried creating an Exchange (2007) account in Address Book, so that might be the solution.)
Anyone know for sure how to do this?
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How do you sync OS X Address Book contacts TO Google Contacts, not FROM Google Contacts?
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ryan's pick
Spanning sync does this pretty well, if you are willing to pay for a solution (and want calendar syncing as well - which is what it really does well.)
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ryan's pick
Back up your Mac's address book first, using the Address Book's "Export: to archive" menu option.
On my main Mac I set the Address Book app prefs to "Synchronize with Google" and click the "Google..." button where I entered my Google credentials.
Works well so far.
Details here: https://www.google.com/support/contactsync/bin/ans...
On my main Mac I set the Address Book app prefs to "Synchronize with Google" and click the "Google..." button where I entered my Google credentials.
Works well so far.
Details here: https://www.google.com/support/contactsync/bin/ans...
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ryan's pick
google sync works pretty good now. Here is a link to the directions that I used.
www.google.com/support/contactsync/bin/answer.py?h...
www.google.com/support/contactsync/bin/answer.py?h...
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ryan's pick
Where are you looking that is/seems to be only one way? The sync option here appears to be two-way.
googlemac.blogspot.com/2009/09/improved-contact-sy...
googlemac.blogspot.com/2009/09/improved-contact-sy...
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ryan's pick
Ran into this issue over Thanksgiving while assisting a family member with moving from a (nearly) destroyed iPhone 3GS to a Samsung Captivate. A manual export/import was the solution I arrived at, but if you plug an iOS device synced with your local contacts into iTunes and tell it to sync with Google Contacts, it pushes everything up. It's a bit of a backwards workaround, but it does work.
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I remember trying to make this work at one point and finding Address Book's "syncing" to be pretty wonky. Eventually I got it to supposedly work, but even then I ended up with a bunch of duplicate contacts that I had to delete or merge. I opened it up just now to see how things look now, and it looks like it's syncing new contacts just fine, which is nice, I guess. I'd recommend what you said--an export from Address Book and an import to Google Contacts--as the path of least resistance.
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In Mac OS 10.6 you can have it sync threw Address Book. It is in the Prefs under accounts. Works with Google Apps to. I also exported out my contacts from Address Book as vcard and imported them into Google Contacts online. Then I allowed Address book to sync. Also, make a archive of the Address Book first. That way if it gets messed up you can revert back. Works great. I can add addresses in Google contacts online or on iOS/Android and it will sync over to Address Book. Also use this for iCal.
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Agree with @doogald, SpanningSync works much better than the native google sync that is build in with OS X.
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