How to export iPhone contacts and import them into Gmail. Here’s how I did it.

Here’s the recipe for how I did it from a desktop computer.

1. Confirm your iPhone contacts are syncing with iCloud: “But, I hate iCloud.” Who doesn’t hate iCloud? But, for this, it’s a necessary evil.
2. Sign into iCloud.com with your apple ID
3. Click the Contacts App icon
4. On the left-hand menu, click once on your first contact, then with your keyboard shortcut, select all : That’s Ctrl+A for Windows, and command+A for Mac users. If you have them in groups, then highlight all the groups.
5. Click the gear icon in the lower left hand corner.
6. Select “Export vCard” : All the files will dump into one .vcf file. Don’t worry. Gmail will like it
7. Log into Gmail
8. Upper left-hand corner of Gmail dashboard, underneath the Google logo (or your company branded logo, if Gmail for business), click the Gmail with the triangle carat next to it.
9. Click on “Contacts”: That will bring up your contacts in Gmail.
10. A couple spots over from the “Contacts” title, there’s a More with a triangle carat. Click it :
11. Select “Import…” : This will bring up a white screen and a white box inside it saying, “Import contacts”.
12. Select the Choose File button
13. From there, go to your “downloads” folder, where your browser of choice is storing the export file.
14. Finish the upload. Sit back, and relax.
15. Optional task – “Merging Duplicates”: Once you get there, you might want to highlight all the contacts in Gmail, select the More button, find the “Find and Merge Duplicates…” and let Google do it’s thing. Up to you.

Why I was exporting contacts from iPhone to Google

Because in a couple hours from now, Katie and I are going downstairs to the Verizon store to pick up our new Google Pixels. They arrived about 90 minutes ago. After over 8 years, I’m leaving the iPhone. New more having to download all the Google-equivalents to the iOS apps. No more worrying about photo storage. No more redundancy to sync everything. I’m hoping it goes well.

Why do I want to remember this?

Because our family is still on iPhones, and we still have iPads that use iOS so we’re not completely abandoning it. Oh yeah, MacBook Pros, too.

And, who knows, maybe I hate the switch to Android and I go back to iPhone with my tail between my legs.

Also, I hated all the tutorials I found but for one

TomsGuide.com had a good tutorial that helped out. The only glitch I ran into was in downloading the contacts. Upon following his steps, I was only downloading one contact at a time. That would take way the Hell too long. And, he turned off the comments on the post so I wrote the steps down to remember them.

Let me know if they helped.