• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

Help Contacts are duplicated

1

13ilgal

Well-Known Member
Why do all my contacts show up twice? Most are contacts that I manually entered way back when, and I think they synced from someplace when I bought the phone, then they were added again when data from my GS3 was ported to this Note 4. Even the Verizon-standard shortcuts (#BAL, #DATA, etc.) are duplicated.

What is the easiest way to get rid of the dupes? I tried Contacts > Settings > Manage Contacts, then selecting and choosing Link, but that doesn't seem to have worked.
 
In my case that has occurred several times because I have multiple e-mail providers (gmail, Exchange, etc.). The first time I got a smart phone it copied the contacts from my Exchange account to the device and then gmail copied them to my gmail account from the device and, boom, duplicates.

I'm sorry to say that I haven't found an easy way to De-dup them. I manually go through and delete the extras.

I really hope someone else has a better way.
 
13ilgal said:
Why do all my contacts show up twice? Most are contacts that I manually entered way back when, and I think they synced from someplace when I bought the phone, then they were added again when data from my GS3 was ported to this Note 4. Even the Verizon-standard shortcuts (#BAL, #DATA, etc.) are duplicated.

What is the easiest way to get rid of the dupes? I tried Contacts > Settings > Manage Contacts, then selecting and choosing Link, but that doesn't seem to have worked.
Click to expand...

You havent said whether the contacts are in your phone too? First try doing an import of all the contacts to your device so that they are saved in your phone. Then, there's a choice to only show phone contacts or use phone contacts, while still contacts auto-backup is on. When you do this, you will only have phone contacts, then when you add any extra contacts, they will be backed up to Google.
 
I found the "only show phone contacts" option and it's checked (that hid all of my work email contacts from Gmail that I don't want in my phone anyway) but still doubles. Someone else suggested a Play Store app. I'll try there before beginning the tedium of manually deleting the duplicates.

Thanks for chiming in, folks! :-)
 
I used to run into this problem a lot early on with my other android devices. I did the duplicate cleaner app a while back. I uploaded all of my contacts to my Google account. Now I only add new contacts to that account.

Among other things, it makes it incredibly easy to move from one android device to another.
 
Had this happen with a phone a few years ago. I had contacts on Google, and on my phone. So I exported all contacts from my phone, deleted all contacts from my phone (which also deleted them from Google),then imported the export list from my phone into Google and then there's a function in Google to merge duplicate contacts. It sounds like a lot of steps, but it wasn't much work. And in the end I had exactly what I wanted - all contacts in Google and Google only.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom