Contacts Cleaner App Reviews

Hi, The app runs fine until you get to empty the notes field in 2000x contacts which you want to fix. while fixing you focus any other app and the app crashes.

I was pretty disappointed in this application. I have a very large database and it seems to have made more of a mess than I had going into using the app. I do not recommend this for a power user.

Can’t figure out what is causing my address book to balloon in size (something is making the same contact appear multiple times), but Contacts Cleaner is a great way to get it back to a manageable number.

This App can and will hose your contacts. The app justly warns you to back up your contacts before using, but if your Contacts are linked with other outside accounts (i.e. gmail) an OS X Contacts archive might not back up everying that Contact Cleaner is mucking around with. You could find yourself (like me) in a data loss situation which not easy to recover from. Not pleased.

The app does what it can really well. It cleaned up a ton of my duplicate contacts, saving me hours of slogging through on my own. It worked flawlessly for me, cleaning up some of the data in my contact records and reducing the number from about 1,200 to about 800. I like a lot of the interface elements, like the way it groups contacts by type of problem (and the ability to collapse the group), the radio buttons for resolution, and the checkbox that allows you to apply the selected fix to all the contacts with the sale problem. Here’s what it won’t do (and probably shouldn’t!): it won’t reconcile duplicate contacts you have on different Internet accounts. For example, I have contacts in my iCloud, Exchange, and two different Google accounts. I still have duplicate contacts after using the app—but only because I have the same contact in iCloud and in Exchange, for example. It felt a little too helpful, identifying “problems” like blank fields (Nicknames, Notes) and bad phone number formatting (213-555-1212 vs (213) 555-1212). But I just ignored those problems. I recommend this app!

I have only 1,086 cards, not syncing with outside DB, so doesn’t take long for Cleaner to work. Have not had any problems as other below. Merges seems to work without a glitch so far. It’s a time saver.

I was a bit skeptical as to whether or not the Contacts Cleaner would work to help me eliminate multiple duplicates as well as clean up the formatting of my Contacts. After takeing a couple of passes on the Contacts, I’m pleased to say that this app was well worth the small investment that I needed to make on the purchase. I recommend it highly.

I was hesitant to pay for this app, i’ve had several attempts to clean up my contacts and merge between different accounts (google, icloud, etc). It won’t go through your exchange accounts but I was fine with that this was fantastic. 4.99 was totally worth it for this one clean up system. It took me 20 min to clean up hundreds and hundreds of contacts and that was at the same time I was dealing with 3 kids and getting breakfast ready. Perfect! Now pull in exchange and we got the best clean up ever. Definately a need for this when you’ve had several accounts over the years of email and handheld media progression.

Even when I turn off every other preference, Contacts Cleaner crashes every time I ask it to find duplicate contacts. It seems to work with every other switch on. Ive tried to contact customer support, but havent received a response after two days

After using this program I trippled the number of contacts in my address book.

I ran one of the fixes it recommended to me. This was to fix the duplicates I had (311 of them). From a spot check, it looked like it was going to fix them properly, so after backing up my contacts, I went ahead and fixed the 311. In reviewing the changes, it deleted contacts, it created new duplicate groups and then split the original group into these multiple groups and spliting up the contacts between them or in fact for some groups duplicating the entire group. I do not recommend using this application.

Complete garbage!!! It wants you to fix everything with one click. Instead of looking at each entry. If you have 10 contacts… great. However, when you have 4k it is too risky to loose everything. Wish I could get a refund…

I like many considered nogt paying for this app. When i used it I was a bit disappointed; somehow I expected more. However, as i use it I am finding my contacts to be neater and cleaner. My international numbers it still treats as composed incorrectly (but it does stop bugging after a point). Because of the squared away feeling my contacts now have, I have finally moved into correcting pronounciations and relationships. I wish it did more such as taking one contact into two. e.i. I had many married people in one contact; now all as individuals. I had many businesses with named people as one contact; now each and the company as one also. I like that at th end of a scan I know all my contacts are there, not dupplicated many times and it sees no errors.

I am adding to my previous review. I haven’t used it for more than a year so I hoped things had improved. First it failed miserably at recognizing company naees as names for people. Secondly it didn’t offer RN (registered nurse), or NP (nurse practitioner) as valid suffixes. I gave up trying to use the program at this point. --- I had almost 8000 contacts. Well not really there were a lot of duplicates. I made two backups before I started. The first one was a large vCard file (address cards) the second was a contacts archive. When I ran it it suggested making a backup. It scanned them all pretty quickly. Contacts Cleaner found a lot with only one name. In most cases it was only a first name. I decided to “fix” the problem and it repeated the first name as a last name. Now a lot of these are also duplicates, but itdidn’t seem to know that Bob (first name) with no last name and a duplicate of Bob with no last name and all other fields the same was a duplicate either before or after I searched for duplicates. There were other duplicates that it missed by simply not recognizing them as duplicates. I scanned and reran scans for duplicates several times and it would find one when I knew there was at least one other one with eight duplicates of one contact. The net result was my confidence level is way down. I have know idea what has been done. So I sent looking for what should have been thee backups made the same day. I have no idea where Contacts cleaner put the backup it made. Searching for all files made today on ‘this mac’ didn’t show it. I have since reverted to the backup I made. [NOTE if you have notes in your contacts saving your data from Apple’s Contacts App as a vCard file the notes seem to get lost. Saving your contacts from Apple’s Contacts App as a Contacts Archive file seems to preserve them. At least that is the way it seemed to work.] In any case I would strongly suggest you consider finding an application to export your contacts as a ‘CSV file (a text file with tab or commas seuerating the fields and a hard return at the end of each record.) before and after running the program and then comparing the files with a word processor or if you can use the command line tools using diff to see what changed. [NOTE if there are hard returns in the notes the CSV file I used they are put into separate rows one for each return.] I confess that I haven’t searched for Contacts Cleaner documentation that describes in detail what each of the options in Contact Cleaner does so my complaints may be attributeable to operator rather than a failure of Contacts Cleaner. I was surprised to find that Contacts Cleaner complained about telephone numbers containing a semicolon (;). The semicolon is insered by my iPhone to tell the ohone two wait before sending the next set of numbers. Disclaimer: Your mileage may vary.

I am in sales and collect contact information at a astonashing rate. If I am at an event or conference I can easily collect 50 cards and a lot of other misc. data. My phone is where it gets stuck, and over time it becomes unruly and needs a good cleaning. I started a new job with a new system, and it duplicated my contacts, and resorted things into a real mess. LinkedIn screwed up my list real good too. The first de-duplicator I bought doesn’t allow you to fix anything in bulk. Meaning- it pulls every contact and asks what you want to do. I had 7800 contacts- this was an impossible task. I bought this app and it groups the errors into similar kinds, allows you to determine the logic of fixing that group (merge, delete, delete the bad variable, etc). I’m 20 minutes into the cleanup and have reduced my list from 7800 entries to 1994. It just cleaned up 720 duplicated ‘notes’! Just what I needed! And so cheap compared to the time it saved!

Im not in the habit of writing glowing reviews just for fun, but this app worked so well I felt compelled to speak up. Over the years, Ive accumulated thousands of contacts in various places. Yahoo, Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook, Skype...you name it. Im a relatively recent convert to Apple products, and I was dismayed to see the horrible mess I had when I tried to pull all of my contacts in the Apple world. This app worked very well at helping me find and clean up problems, and as others have noted, it also lets me say, "Do this for ALL problems like this." Im very pleased and I consider the purchase price very reasonable, especially when you consider how much time it saved me.

Worst $5 spent. It confuses prefixes to “bad names”, people with two last names are not well processed, it doesn’t give you more options, you are stucked having to do it on the Contacts app… definetly save your money and skip buying this app!!!!

Managing multiple contact groups across multiple shared accounts… family, work, etc… I end up with lots of duplicates and bad information when business cards get scanned in…. this app does a good job at cleaning it all up and getting my contacts a little more organized.

It looks to me like cleaning up data is just hard, and contacts must be harder. Nothing I’ve tried, on any platform, gets it done perfectly or without a little anxiety. But the PITA factor with this is much less, the errors (like having to just write off an address that just has a single email in it…where you know the person’s name, or could guess…because it’s just not worth opening up Contacts and typing in your guesses) are fewer, and most of all the anxiety is very low. You can *see* what it’s doing. I guess the unpleasantness is having to admit that, after moving contacts among systems for years, there’s just some attrition. Which is not the program’s fault. The great thing about Contacts Cleaner is: it happens fast, you can see what’s going on, and then it’s back to real work. TOTALLY worth the tiny price.

This new version is much faster and easier to use. I had problems in the past but they seem to be solved