3 Ways to Merge Contacts on iPhone in 2019

Updated Mar 28,2019 | by Cody

You may find some duplicate contacts of the same people on your iPhone while using it for a long time. For those people have synced iPhone contacts with Facebook, Outlook, or Gmail, they are more likely to have multiple duplicated contacts.

If this happens to you, as it will eventually, you follow this guide to clear this up. There are a few methods to get it done. You can either merge duplicates to single master contacts if some please actually have multiple phone numbers or emails, or delete the duplicated contacts.

If you don’t have too many duplicate contacts for the same person contain different information, you can manually merge contacts with the same name in a few taps on your iPhone.

Step 1. Open your Contacts app to see all the contacts. Then scroll through the list until you find the contact with same name, and tap on it to see the contact details.

Step 2. On the contact info page, tap on the Edit option in the top-right corner. 

Step 3. In the next page, scroll down a bit and you will see the “Link Contacts” option. Tap on it and then you can select a contact that you want to link to.

If you have serval contacts with this same name, you can continue to link contacts. That’s how you can merge a few contacts on iPhone easily. If you want to sync your Gmail or Outlook contacts with your iPhone contacts, which will most likely result in more duplicate contacts, you certainly don’t want to go the manual way.

If you want to add your Gmail contacts, Outlook contacts or contacts from a file, you can try this iPhone manager - IOTransfer that allows you to quickly sync contacts to iPhone on iOS 12. When duplicate contacts detected, it will automatically merge contacts with the same name.

Sound cool? Let’s take Gmail contacts as an example to see how it works.

Step 1. Free download and install IOTransfer to your computer running Windows 10/8/7.

Step 2. Export your Gmail contacts to computer as CSV file if you haven’t.

Step 3. Launch IOTransfer and connect your iPhone to PC with a USB cable. Then click on“MANAGE”and select“Contacts”.

 Step 4. From ther Contacts screen, click on “Import” and select the CSV file to start sync. You may be notified to confirm to merge contacts on iPhone if contacts with the same name are detected.

When the process is done, you won’t find any duplicated contacts on your iPhone due to the sync. If needed, you can also edit the contacts info or add new contacts with IOTransfer. It should be more convenient than doing that on your iPhone.

If your iPhone already have some duplicated contacts and you simply want to remove the duplicates, IOTransfer can still be of help. Not the direct way through.

Step 1. As you the previous method, you can use IOTransfer to export all the contact from iPhone to a CSV file and delete all the contacts on iPhone.

Step 2. After that, click on View File to open the CSV file you just exported from your iPhone. 

Step 3. Within the CSV file, select the Name Column and Now click Data and then select Remove Duplicates.

Step 4. After that, Save the file. Go back to IOTransfer, click on Import. And select the CSV file. Now all the duplicates are removed. 

In this way, all the duplicated contacts with the same name are deleted. Besides merging iPhone contacts, IOTransfer has many other features that can help you better manage and organize your files on iPhone. You can use it to clean iPhone junk files, convert videos, make GIFs, transfer files between iPhone and PC wirelessly, etc.

Related Readings for Reference