A favorite for our power users, Contacts for Mac OS X allows you to easily search, access, and maintain your contacts directly from your dock or menu bar. Install on macOS The most intuitive contact management app for professionals, teams, and small businesses. Mar 21, 2016 Imagine this: you’re working happily on your Mac when the dreaded beach ball of death appears. A program stops responding or worse, the macOS (or OS X) itself refuses to do anything but stare at you, blankly. You have a frozen Mac app or an OS X freeze. Mac OS not responding can lead to lost productivity or even lost work.
Having trouble with your iCloud contacts not updating on MacBooks or Macs? If so, you are not alone. We see quite a few of our readers report problems with their contacts, especially after updating their macOS or changing contact specific information (like deleting phone numbers and adding new numbers or emails in.)
Let’s face it! Our smartphones are a vital means to communicate with everyone that we know and meet. Who remembers phone numbers anymore? Our smartphones do that work for us.
Consequently, you should routinely update your Contacts list, especially after you make any changes or updates to your contacts!
Unfortunately, there have been some recent issues with iCloud Contacts being properly synced. The issue mainly arises with the syncing of contacts from iCloud to your MacBook.
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There are a few different fixes, but one that continued to work on a regular basis requires a bit of deep diving. First, you’ll need to head over to iCloud.com. From here, you will need to export your contacts into a ‘vCard’.
The vCard is a digital business card, which holds all of your contacts so they can be reuploaded. Which, in fact, is a step that we will be taking after the vCard has been created.
A new file will appear in your Downloads folder, and it will be named like “Adam *** and 53 contacts.vcf”. This file is extremely important, so it’s important to not forget the location.
Warning: We implore everyone to ensure that their contact list is up-to-date as to not lose any important information.
As expected, your entire contact list is removed and you will now have a fresh start. Once the contacts have been deleted from the iCloud web client, then you’ll notice them removed from your iPhone as well. After this has happened, then you can proceed.
The reason that we created the vCard earlier wasn’t just to have a local backup of all of your contacts. Instead, we will be using this file to re-import all of your contacts to iCloud.
This takes a few minutes, but you will begin seeing your various contacts populating on the web client. What may take a bit longer is for all of your contacts to reappear on your various mobile devices, including your MacBook.
Have no fear though, as everything is working in the background to properly sync across your iCloud-enabled devices. Unfortunately, there will be one thing missing from your contact list when this process is completed.
If you have specific contacts with custom pictures, these will be removed. After the contacts have been re-imported, you will need to manually update each contact with an appropriate picture.
As we stated above, keeping your contacts updated across all of your devices is extremely important. So if you continue running into issues, be sure that to let us know in the comments below and we’ll do everything we can to help.
If you have found another workaround for this issue, sound off and let us know!
Andrew is a freelance writer based on the East Coast of the US.
He has written for a variety of sites over the years, including iMore, Android Central, Phandroid, and a few others. Now, he spends his days working for an HVAC company, while moonlighting as a freelance writer at night.