How to manage your Google Contacts

Turn to the Google Contacts website to add, remove or resolve conflicts with your contacts list.

Those of you who use Gmail, Google Workspace or another Google tool likely maintain a list of contacts via Google. If you need to fix a problem with your contacts list, you can accomplish that at the Google Contacts website. Here, you’re able to view and edit your contacts, manually add and remove contacts, import and export contacts, and resolve issues with duplicate contacts.

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Open the Google Contacts site in your browser to see all your existing contacts (Figure A).

Figure A

The first thing you may want to do is edit an existing contact. Browse through the list or type the name of a contact in the search field to find it. Open the contact’s entry and revise the necessary information. To add a photo, click the image icon then browse and select the photo you wish to upload. When done, click Save (Figure B).

Figure B

Next, you may want to add a new contact. Click the Create Contact button and select Create A Contact to add one contact. Fill out the necessary fields and save the entry for the new contact (Figure C).

Figure C

You can create multiple contacts in one shot. Click the Create Contact button and select Create Multiple Contacts. To do this, type the first person’s full name or email address and add a comma. Then type the second person’s full name or email address and add a comma. Continue this way until you’ve added all the new contacts. You can then edit each contact individually to add more details (Figure D).

Figure D

A more effective way to add multiple contacts is by importing them. For this, the contacts would need to be stored in the vCard format or as a CSV file, which you can save from Excel. Click the Import command in the left page, select the file you wish to import and then click Import (Figure E).

Figure E

If you want to transfer your Google contacts to a different application or service, you can export them. To export all your contacts, click the Export command and choose the format for the export: Google CVS, Outlook CSV or vCard.

To export only certain contacts, select each one you wish to export by hovering over the entry and clicking the checkbox. You can select multiple contiguous contacts by clicking the first one, holding down the Shift key, and then clicking the last one you want to include. Click the Export command, make sure the option is set to selected contacts and then choose the format (Figure F).

Figure F

You can run other commands on your contacts. Select one or more contacts. Click the three-dot icon at the top. You can now print, export, hide or delete your selected contacts (Figure G).

Figure G

You can categorize your contacts by labels. Click the Create label command on the left and type a name for the label. The new label should then appear. To apply a label to a contact, drag and drop the entry for that contact onto the label (Figure H).

Figure H

Finally, you may bump into duplicate contacts in the list, especially if you’ve manually created some of them and imported some from another source. Google will tell you if it detects duplicate contacts by listing the number of them in the Merge & Fix section. Click the button for Merge & Fix. Google will show you which contacts are duplicates. Click the Merge command for any duplicates you wish to merge. Click the Merge All button to merge all the duplicates (Figure I).

Figure I