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Why can I no longer drag a contacts into a Group in my Mac's Contacts app?

Moving contacts into groups has always been straightforward in the past. It was simply drag and drop. However, this function stopped working after a somewhat recent update to Big Sur 11.6.x and the lack of performance is still persistent in the most current Big Sur 11.6.8.


It has been suggested in other threads that that the problem is due to either duplicate contact records, contacts already belonging to the Group of interest, or that the Group is a Smart Group with automated membership rules. None of these cases are true for me.


I drag the contact over a group and the Group name doesn't get highlighted as it should. When I release the contact over a group, it simply springs back to its original place in the list of contacts. When I open the group of interest the contact I attempted to drag there is not listed.


This seems to be an obvious bug in the OS or Contacts application, since I have been organizing contacts into groups quite easily and successfully for at least 10 years prior. It is only in the last few months that this has become a problem for me. The quirky thing is that the problem seems to be intermittent and only seems to occur after performing contacts maintenance (e.g. updating or deleting contacts).


A telltale sign that contacts cannot be moved is that the application performs sluggishly. (i.e. takes a few seconds before it responds to clicks, creation of new contacts or saving edited contacts). Another tell is that the Group Location feature doesn't work. (i.e. Holding down the Option key is supposed to highlight the groups that the selected contact is a member of.) When the Group Location feature does not work, it is also impossible to add any contacts into any groups.

Posted on Aug 30, 2022 7:38 PM

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5 replies

Aug 31, 2022 2:30 PM in response to apple_owner_VTD

Hello apple_owner_VTD,


Welcome to Apple Support Communities. To better understand this behavior, we'd like to perform the following steps to isolate this issue further:


  • Create a test contact, and a test group, and try to add the test contact to the test group
  • Test this behavior in safe mode. Here's how to start up in safe mode: Start up your Mac in safe mode

Starting up your Mac in safe mode can help you identify whether issues you’re experiencing are caused by software that loads as your Mac starts up

That can help isolate whether the issue is system wide, or account specific. 



Let us know the results. Kind regards.

Sep 5, 2022 8:29 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

I just found that the problem only seems to happen after deleting contacts that reside in a group or removing a contact from a group. Quitting and relaunching the Apple Contacts app seems to fix the problem until the next offense. Since this workaround is fairly simple, I think I will just live with it for now. As long as I am not doing any mailbox maintenance that involves removing contacts from groups the drag and drop function in Contacts seem to work consistently well.

Why can I no longer drag a contacts into a Group in my Mac's Contacts app?

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