iCloud Contacts Mayhem

That’s what I am trying to say – changes I make to the contact list on the laptop don’t appear anywhere else. Changes I make on the Mac Mini don’t appear anywhere else. The iPhone and iPad lack any tools for finding and resolving duplicates so I am not using those devices. These devices are all connected by the same iCloud account but they appear to have different versions of the contacts list.

A small follow up, and some thoughts on this issue.

I have spent a week doing an extensive comb through of the contact data on the laptop (which had the contact number I believed to be closest to the truth), eliminating duplicates by hand, removing corrupted custom images from some contacts, and eliminating redundant data (the same contact had the same phone number repeated two or sometimes three times). At some point during this process the synchronization between the various devices began to work again. The iPad and the Mac mini still report a number that is slightly higher than the laptop has, but each of these devices has a number of duplicate entries that the laptop does not have. I am now doing a run through the data on these other machines, eliminating duplicates I spot by hand, and the total contacts number appears to be converging on the same value that the laptop has. I would use the “find duplicates” function in Contacts, but I don’t trust it since the last time I attempted to use it on the Mini, I got a wildly wrong result.

My current theory is that some corrupted image data found its its way into the database from one of the devices (most likely from the iPhone) and because the app does no format verification or sanitation on the image data, it finds its way to the iCloud database, and synchronization stops for all devices. (The user had a habit of taking large size photographs with the iPhone camera and dragging and dropping those into contacts and applying severe cropping. At no point is the image actually converted to a format suitable for vcards or other distribution methods.) By combing through the database by hand, and eliminating oversized or odd looking contact images (sometimes showing up as simply a black circle) at some point the synchronization resumed and edits that I made to the database from that point on actually propagated to all of the other devices. Any edits prior to that moment were lost in time which is why some duplicates linger in the iCloud database. Rather than the nuclear option (deleting the entire database and re-importing everything) I believe that eliminating the remaining duplicates by hand is the least likely to cause disruption for the user in the long run.

Some thoughts: the contacts database is meant to be a cloud-based database and should appear as exactly the same data on each machine attached to that database. This is clearly not the case, so some kind of local caching is involved in this process. There needs to be some kind of interface method within each version of the “Contacts“ app on the various devices to clear the cache and re-sync with the server.

As an online database, the function to find and eliminate or merge duplicate entries should be server based, not reliant upon the device with which the database is used. This means that the “find duplicates” function should be available on the iPhone and iPad as well as desktop and laptop computers since this function should be performed on the server, on the one true version of the database, and then the “repaired“ version of the database re-synchronized with all devices.

Adding photos to contacts is a nice quality of life feature, but only if the data is made compatible with the Vcard format. At a minimum the photo should be cropped and resized to the standard of 256 x 256 so that this data becomes as shareable as possible. The “Contacts“ app appears to retain the entire image and stores cropping and scaling information instead of modifying the data. VCards with such images cannot be read by many applications—even the web-based iCloud service cannot read these vCards.

This has been a long tiresome process made necessary by some sloppy and poor design decisions. Apple Contacts has been available as a service for so long that I am shocked that such glaring issues still remain with the service.