For quite sometime now I’ve been struggling with lots of duplicate entries in my Address Book, that was a result of –
- Syncs from Treo to BB and then to iPhone.
- Syncs from .mac, my trusty companion since 2005 – PB-G4-12″, intel Mac and a MacBook from’03.
- Syncs of contacts from LinkedIn, Yahoo and GMail on a regular basis.
Believe it or not, there are so many places you end up creating contacts that after a while it becomes really cumbersome to manage contacts. Finally, as a weekend project I decided to get rid of duplicates – and here’s an interested script that I came across – that allowed me to sift through duplicates while not deleting them right away. Hope this helps everyone out, though you can easily find the script on Mac OS X Hints as well. Having a built-in feature within Address Book to deal with this issue would certainly help – or better yet within iPhone itself.
(*REVISED FOR 10.6Details found at – http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060322202753429Written by © Mark Hunte – 2009*)tell application “Address Book”set biglist to {}set theGroup to “Dupilicate Entries”if not (exists (group “Dupilicate Entries”)) thenmake new group with properties {name:”Dupilicate Entries”}saveend ifset the_names to name of peoplerepeat with i from 1 to number of items in the_namesset theName to item i of the_namesif theName is not in biglist thencopy theName to end of biglistelseset counter to (people whose name is theName)if (count of counter) > 1 thenrepeat with i from 1 to number of items in counterset this_item to item i of counteradd this_item to group theGroupend repeatsaveend ifend ifend repeatend tell
