How do I push Droid contacts back to Gmail's "My Contacts"
My phone will pull from "My Contacts" occasionally but it isn't sending the phone's contact information back up. VZ pulled my info from my old phone and loaded it on here. Now I want to get that info back up to My Contacts so I can edit/merge. Then I'd be fine with blanking the phone's contacts and pulling down a fresh/clean list.
This is an inexcusable flaw in my view. There is a stream of contact questions just floating by the front page on this forum with no answers/insight... documentation!
Its a phone for crying out loud. Contact functionality is a primary objective. If this platform is going to play in the same league as BB/iPhone this stuff has to "just work" when the platform comes to market. Yeah yeah, "open source" blah blah blah. I run Linux and BSD for fun, I get it. I just expected better.
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From contacts, go to the menu, select your gmail account, and make sure that sync contacts is checked. Phone should have been set up to do this automatically.
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Here is what i gather from the contact layout. There is a local account that i believe is specific to the device and doesn't get synced and then there is another full contact setup below the first that goes to the gmail account. So basically when you edit a contact the first set of information is information that came from you gmail and now is your local setup. The second set of info is info that will go back to you gmail account overwriting the info that is on gmail.
This is an inexcusable flaw in my view. There is a stream of contact questions just floating by the front page on this forum with no answers/insight... documentation!
Its a phone for crying out loud. Contact functionality is a primary objective. If this platform is going to play in the same league as BB/iPhone this stuff has to "just work" when the platform comes to market. Yeah yeah, "open source" blah blah blah. I run Linux and BSD for fun, I get it. I just expected better.
To test this flaw, I simply created a contact in contacts called "test". I saved it and then logged into gmail and went into contacts to see that "test" is there. I immediately created in gmail a new contact called "test2" and after saving it checked my phone and saw "test2" on it.
To summarize, THERE IS NO FLAW...
Here are a few things you can try if your phone wasnt properly set up at verizon.
Man, I can say with ab solute certianty those things are all done. I remind you it is pulling from mycontacts so obviosly accounts are aligned, permissions given and Sync is enabled.
Well sucks for you but my contacts having always synced both ways with my G1 and now with my Droid. You obviously have something setup wrong because it constantly syncs with Google so any contact you create on the Droid WILL sync with Google unless you have a setting disabled. Try calling VZW or Google as maybe your problem is deeper then the phone itself.
__________________ So I'm guessin' there's questions that need addressin' like how he fresh in the adolescence and wreckin em' Rules & Guidelines, Zero Tolerance Policy.
Also, if I delete a contact, I'd like to delete in My Contacts as well.
I just tested this both ways. I made a new contact in my phones contacts, showed up on gmail's contacts, deleted from gmail contacts and it deleted from my phones contacts. I then made a new contact from my phone, waited for it to show up on gmails contact list, deleted it from my phone contacts, refreshed gmail and its still there.
It appears that if you add a contact to gmails contact list the only way to remove it is via gmail, even if you delete it off your phone. I dont think this is really a bad idea because in the event that you mistakenly delete someone it will still be up on gmail.
I just tested this both ways. I made a new contact in my phones contacts, showed up on gmail's contacts, deleted from gmail contacts and it deleted from my phones contacts. I then made a new contact from my phone, waited for it to show up on gmails contact list, deleted it from my phone contacts, refreshed gmail and its still there.
It appears that if you add a contact to gmails contact list the only way to remove it is via gmail, even if you delete it off your phone. I dont think this is really a bad idea because in the event that you mistakenly delete someone it will still be up on gmail.
OK, I took this one step further just to test a more few things. Somehow gmail knows which contacts you have deleted off your phone because even though they stay on your gmail contact list they dont resync. I tested this by adding a new contact on gmail while leaving the previously deleted contacts in place. I then checked my phone and only the new contact synced to the phone. I have to say, its pretty impressive.
I can get my contacts to sync from gmail and if I add a contact from phone it goes to gmails. However the info that was on my phone from verizon switiching over my contacts is not and if i edit it has a account labels Phone-Only (unsynced) contact.
Could this have to do with the Verizon rep adding my contacts before my gmail account as added to the device? Going to try and reset phone and load my gmail account and then the vcards. This processed worked!
If you phone contacts will not go to gmail do the following:
If verizon rep moved out your contacts more then likely you will have a vcard on your sdcard aleady but to be safe export contacts to sdcard.
Then go into settings/privacy/factory data reset.
Once the phone is reset follow the on screen instructions
Once u have your gmail account set up go to contacts and select import contacts.
Last edited by Gnome; November 7th, 2009 at 09:49 PM.
U will not lose your installed apps but you will lose settings. But not a big deal for me since i got the phone yesterday. Just happy to be able to get all my contacts synced together.
When I purchased the droid, before I could sync my gmail contacts, Verizon rep helped me transfer my contacts from my previous phone, a blackberry. Now I have duplicate information for each of my contacts, one set from gmail and the other set which says "Phone only (unsynced) contact". How do I remove the information from "Phone only (unsynced) contact"? Thanks.
That the same thing that happened to me. First check and see if the vcard fromyou blackberry is still on your sdcard. If not go to contacts and select export. Factory reset the phone and then follow the on screen instructions. Setup your gmail account and sync. Once this is complete import your old vcard.
I just tested this both ways. I made a new contact in my phones contacts, showed up on gmail's contacts, deleted from gmail contacts and it deleted from my phones contacts. I then made a new contact from my phone, waited for it to show up on gmails contact list, deleted it from my phone contacts, refreshed gmail and its still there.
It appears that if you add a contact to gmails contact list the only way to remove it is via gmail, even if you delete it off your phone. I dont think this is really a bad idea because in the event that you mistakenly delete someone it will still be up on gmail.
Well, if I delete a contact I want it to be deleted, so I wish there was an option for full synching, in that respect.
Contacts added from my phone are now showing up in Gmail, so that's a relief, and if the contacts I delete from my phone are not resynched when I add another contact and it resynchs, then I can live with it. I still wish it would delete it from Gmail, though.
Solution to clean up contact problems with out factory reset!
Hi,
I was also facing all the problems with contact, that is being discussed under this thread. I think factory reset is drastic step and so I didn't prefer doing it.
My solution:
1) First ensure that you have all the contacts as you desire in your google/gmail account.
2) Export these contacts as vCf (vcard) format and save it to your computer.
3) To give a fresh start. No go ahead and delete all or as much as contacts as you need from your droid, especially the onces where you need to get rid of "Phone only (unsynced) contacts".
Now you will get a notification which says "Too many deletes" Its o.k. to leave it as such. It will also give a 'sync error' when you try to sync with gmail contacts. Dont worry!
4) Now connect your droid with your computer using USB. I assume you know how to enable transfer of files.
5) Copy the "contacts.vcf" to SD card in droid (under folder 'DCIM') that you had previously exported from gmail and had saved in your computer.
6) Now go back to your contacts in droid and import from SD card this vcf file. It will import all the contacts in to droid.
7) Now try to sync it with gmail account. It will do it as instructed!
8) Go to your notifications. Find the alert "Too many deletes". Long press on it, it will give you the option to delete all. Do it and you are done.
I am having this same problem, and it is getting pretty frustrating.
I can create or delete a contact from gmail contacts using my computer and the change shows up in my Droid contacts.
If i delete or add a contact from the phone it is NOT changed in gmail on my computer.
I checked the sync settings and noticed something odd. On the Accounts > Manage Accounts menu there is a list: Sync Calendar, Sync Contacts, and Sync Gmail. Each has a date and both Calendar and Gmail are up to date, but Contacts is from 2 days ago when I forst bought the phone. Pressing the menu button brings up an option to sync all. Each account will sync, get a sync icon that disappears, and the date updates, but the contacts' sync icon does not disappear and the date does not update.
To push my contacts from gmail and the phone, I went into contacts>accounts>gmail>and uncheck sync contacts and recheck it. thats how it updates the contacts....
My problem was the same as Gnome's. I had luckily backed up my vcf file earlier. I used that and followed his steps again after coffee (and not as frustrated) this morning. All is well now.
Well I am happy to say that I have mine working now.
Unfortunately, I did have to do a reset to factory defaults.
After resetting, I just followed the onscreen steps and after everything was done sync was working both ways for adding and deleting. I have a feeling the instore guy screwed up on one of the steps initially setting up the phone.
Now when I sync, the date and time actually update on the sync menu.
Another thing I learned while working with this problem is that if you are looking for changes to show up in your gmail contacts on your PC, make sure you refresh the mail screen and then click on the contacts link because most browsers like to cache the info on the contact list. Even after fixing it, my browser was telling me that contacts were not being updated until I refreshed the contact list.
Last edited by cww256; November 8th, 2009 at 02:53 PM.
I was also facing all the problems with contact, that is being discussed under this thread. I think factory reset is drastic step and so I didn't prefer doing it.
My solution:
1) First ensure that you have all the contacts as you desire in your google/gmail account.
2) Export these contacts as vCf (vcard) format and save it to your computer.
3) To give a fresh start. No go ahead and delete all or as much as contacts as you need from your droid, especially the onces where you need to get rid of "Phone only (unsynced) contacts".
Now you will get a notification which says "Too many deletes" Its o.k. to leave it as such. It will also give a 'sync error' when you try to sync with gmail contacts. Dont worry!
4) Now connect your droid with your computer using USB. I assume you know how to enable transfer of files.
5) Copy the "contacts.vcf" to SD card in droid (under folder 'DCIM') that you had previously exported from gmail and had saved in your computer.
6) Now go back to your contacts in droid and import from SD card this vcf file. It will import all the contacts in to droid.
7) Now try to sync it with gmail account. It will do it as instructed!
8) Go to your notifications. Find the alert "Too many deletes". Long press on it, it will give you the option to delete all. Do it and you are done.
I hope this helps.
Step 6 is WAY easier said then done. How do you move the contacts from the SD card to import the contacts into the Droid. I have the Droid Eris and cannot for the life of me figure out how to do this. I'm getting really frustrated since I've deleted all of my contacts.
I read through most of the thread and will tell you what I did to solve a very similar problem on my wife's Eris.
First some background, I bought a Droid for myself and an Eris for my wife. My contacts worked perfectly and my wife's were all screwed up like some of the posters here. The only difference was I transferred my contacts to Gmail before I bought the Droid and my wife had hers transferred in the store by the Verizon rep.
Now here is what worked to get hers setup correctly, unfortunatly this will require a factory reset of the phone.
Wipe the phone but do not go through the setup yet. On the computer go to Gmail -> Contacts -> Import -> Browse for file
Fom there browse to your vCard file load it up and now your contacts are in Gmail. It works best merging them etc now before linking the device to the account. Once you have your contacts imported and merged go back to the phone and run through the initial setup process. This time your contacts will be setup correctly and will all sync with Gmail.
Last edited by krichek; November 13th, 2009 at 12:07 PM.
My son's new Droid had the same problem. The folks at Verizon moved his contacts from his old phone to the Droid. We then exported his contacts from his Hotmail account and imported them into his newly created Gmail account. So far so good. His Hotmail account had emails for the most part. As several people have noted, the phone contacts that were moved at the Verizon store were tagged "Phone only (unsynced) contact" and would not sync with the same contact imported from Hotmail. We found when we added a phone number to the contact online, it did eventually sync with the phone. However, when we went to edit the contact, there were two parts to each of these once duplicate contacts. Kind of sloppy I think more than a functional problem. He was able to go in manually and then delete the phone only part of the contact information. It's going to be a time consuming task. Fortunately, he does not have that many contacts.
That said.. I am trying to avoid the same problem when I purchase my Droid. To prep for the change over, I created a Gmail account and I too exported my Hotmails contacts into Gmail using .csv file format. I use Verizon Backupassistant for my Motorola phone. If you log into your backup contacts list on Verizonwireless.com, you are able to export your phone contacts into a .csv file. I then imported my phone contacts into Gmail. The downside is that I had to manually merge a number of contacts... those with both emails on my Hotmail and phone numbers on my phone. Don't know if the Droid would have merged these contacts if I had one!
As an aside.. tech support (on the phone) at Verizon was the one to suggest moving contacts using Backup Assistant rather than doing it directly at the store. It sounded as if he was reading from a memo.. which makes me think that they are now aware of the issues related to merely copying contacts at the store.
I am having this same problem, and it is getting pretty frustrating.
I can create or delete a contact from gmail contacts using my computer and the change shows up in my Droid contacts.
If i delete or add a contact from the phone it is NOT changed in gmail on my computer.
I checked the sync settings and noticed something odd. On the Accounts > Manage Accounts menu there is a list: Sync Calendar, Sync Contacts, and Sync Gmail. Each has a date and both Calendar and Gmail are up to date, but Contacts is from 2 days ago when I forst bought the phone. Pressing the menu button brings up an option to sync all. Each account will sync, get a sync icon that disappears, and the date updates, but the contacts' sync icon does not disappear and the date does not update.
Well I am happy to say that I have mine working now.
Unfortunately, I did have to do a reset to factory defaults.
After resetting, I just followed the onscreen steps and after everything was done sync was working both ways for adding and deleting. I have a feeling the instore guy screwed up on one of the steps initially setting up the phone.
Now when I sync, the date and time actually update on the sync menu.
Another thing I learned while working with this problem is that if you are looking for changes to show up in your gmail contacts on your PC, make sure you refresh the mail screen and then click on the contacts link because most browsers like to cache the info on the contact list. Even after fixing it, my browser was telling me that contacts were not being updated until I refreshed the contact list.
OKAY!!! I solved the issue here...I have reset my phone 3 times tonight! Here's whats happening because I have the same problem. The second you add a photo to your contact the sync will not work with google. All you get is a circle that will turn 2 times and then stop and it wont let you sync anymore.
Who do I contact about this! It is the problem. I have nothing installed on my droid and I thought that was going to be the problem and on the first change I did to the droid it locked up the sync. So where or who do we tell to get this fixed! :-(
When I purchased the droid, before I could sync my gmail contacts, Verizon rep helped me transfer my contacts from my previous phone, a blackberry. Now I have duplicate information for each of my contacts, one set from gmail and the other set which says "Phone only (unsynced) contact". How do I remove the information from "Phone only (unsynced) contact"? Thanks.
If you haven't already figured this out...
Hope you don't have too many contacts, I did the export to card import to google, reset phone method in this thread because I didn't want to do this 100+ times.
select a contact
menu/split/confirm
delete the one you don't want (assume it is the phone only one)
To test this flaw, I simply created a contact in contacts called "test". I saved it and then logged into gmail and went into contacts to see that "test" is there. I immediately created in gmail a new contact called "test2" and after saving it checked my phone and saw "test2" on it.
To summarize, THERE IS NO FLAW...
Here are a few things you can try if your phone wasnt properly set up at verizon.
U will not lose your installed apps but you will lose settings. But not a big deal for me since i got the phone yesterday. Just happy to be able to get all my contacts synced together.
I lost all my installed Apps after doing the factory reset...
E-Z Solution - Convert Droid Contacts to Google (Gmail) Contacts
Here's what I did to get my Droid contacts converted to Google contacts (i.e. imported into my Gmail contacts which syncs with the phone).
1) Goto contacts
press the menu button (bottom of phone)
select "Import/Export"
select "Export to SD Card"
select "OK" to confirm exporting your contact list to your SD card as a vcf file.
2) Tether your Droid to you PC via the USB cable (that is a component of the AC charger).
3) Open browser and log into Gmail.
select the "Contacts" link
select the "Import" link
browse and select the vcf file saved to your phone's SD card
select "Import"
Note: The import process will reconcile and merge the Google contacts that were on your phone when you exported your contacts to the SD card.
That's it! Provided the settings on your phone are set to sync with Google contacts, what was once your "Droid-only" contacts now become (are somehow converted to) "Google contacts".
I hope this helps!
The Following User Says Thank You to Keola For This Useful Post:
I have the same problem - Anything I add in Google shows up on the Droid, but changes on the Droid do not show up in Google.
Syncing via export does work, but then I had a lot of double to clean up. I've got mine too customized to go back and factory reset now. Frustrating.
In a possibly related vein, I seem to receive notifications on email only now and then, not every email (which, actually, would be annoying, but still...)
After my post, I did notice that it MERGED the Droid contacts with my Google contacts, so that each person's contact had the information listed twice. It was time consuming to delete the duplicate information one-by-one, but over a course of a few days, I got removed the duplicated data. I just did a few letters of the alphabet each day.
The alternative was to reset my Droid, but like you, I had already customized mine too much. I could have also just left the Droid contacts unsynced and manually backed up the data to the SD card on a periodic basis, but we all know how that would go -- eventually I'd get lazy and the data would never get backed up. And, since Verizon's Backup Assistant does not work with the Droid contact data, I was left with the solution in my original post. All the other solutions seemed too complicated -- downloading conduit programs, cleaning data in another program, etc.
iI'm not sure why you are only receiving sporadic e-mail notifications. All I know is I have my settings to check for my e-mail every 15 minutes, and it seems to work OK.
Ok this might be what others are seeing, contacts do sync just fine from droid to google account,,,, except!!! facebook contacts do not! they dont even save to file when exported to file on droid, just tried it and when i imported the file from droid to gmail the facebook contacts are not there............
I would like to have them in gmail online so i can back them up as well
Ok this might be what others are seeing, contacts do sync just fine from droid to google account,,,, except!!! facebook contacts do not! they dont even save to file when exported to file on droid, just tried it and when i imported the file from droid to gmail the facebook contacts are not there............
I would like to have them in gmail online so i can back them up as well
I am in the exact same boat...want to sync my facebook contacts from droid to gmail on pc. Any answers would be appreciated!
I just fixed my problem. The contacts from my previous phone weren't showing up in my contacts on the phone. I could search for and find them, so I knew they were somewhere on the phone or account, but I didn't know where. after reading some of the initial posts and replies, I decided to log into gmail via my PC. When I clicked on "contacts" via the left menu in gmail, I noticed that it said, MY contacts = 1, all contacts = 72. When I clicked on all contacts, I saw that I could select them and move them to "My contacts". My phone then synced the all. Happiness!
I just got a Droid yesterday and had a little problem today because I did not appear to have access to the contacts that were originally on my previous phone - I did have them ported over.
The only contacts I had available were the ones I had entered into my gmail account. I just figured out that my contacts from my Droid were synced to my gmail account, but were added as "other contacts" only "my contacts" are available on the Droid. You can fairly easily move contacts from other contacts to my contacts just search for the contacts through gmail...
For one, sorry for resurrecting an old thread but I was trying to fix "Contacts from Droid were not syncing up to gMail but was syncing down from gMail to Droid".
Took me a few hours to figure out why I couldn't get this to work. I finally figured it out.
The reason why my contacts were not syncing from the phone to gMail was because my contacts were set to "phone" and not "google". I noticed that when I deleted all my contacts after I exported them to SD card and imported them back in. When I imported them back in from SDcard, it gave me a choice on whether to import the vCard to "Google" or "Phone" and I chose "Google." After it imported all my contacts back, I noticed it was syncing to gMail. After a few minutes, I logged in my gMail, and viola!!!! My contacts were in gMail.
1) Backup contacts to SDCard by: Contacts > Menu > Import/Export
2) Delete all contacts
3) Import all contacts from SD card
4) When it asks, choose "Google"
5) Done
I hope this helps a few of you out there (if you're still having this problem)
__________________
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Last edited by dEris; July 17th, 2010 at 11:52 PM.
The Following User Says Thank You to dEris For This Useful Post:
This is crazy. What a mess. I am still trying to get my contacts from my previous phone to show up. They will pull up when I get a call from them or I can search for them, but They are not in my contacts list. uuuuggghhh. I paid too much money to have a problem like this.
How do I push Droid contacts back to Gmail's "My Contacts"
original contacts moved to Droid
