Overview

Contacts exported from phones, email, social media, and other sources often have duplicates and conflicts. Claude can intelligently merge these contacts, remove duplicates, and retain the most complete information.

Use Cases

Organize contacts before switching phones
Merge work and personal contacts
Clean duplicate contact entries
Fill in missing contact information

Steps

Step 1: Import and Analyze Contacts

Check contact counts and formats in each file.

Please analyze these contact files:
- ~/contacts/phone_contacts.csv
- ~/contacts/email_contacts.csv
- ~/contacts/linkedin_contacts.csv
Show contact count, field list, and data completeness for each file

Step 2: Identify Duplicate Contacts

Find records that might be the same person.

Identify duplicate contacts based on these rules:
- Phone numbers exactly match (ignore format differences)
- Email addresses match
- Names are highly similar (ignore case, spaces)
Group potentially duplicate contacts, showing for each group:
- Information from each source
- Information completeness score
- Recommendation for which one to keep

Step 3: Smart Field Merging

Create the most complete contact information for each person.

For duplicate contacts, please merge information:
- Prefer non-empty fields
- Unify phone number formats then merge (there may be multiple)
- Merge emails (primary and backup)
- For address, company info, choose the latest or most detailed
- Add "Source" field indicating where info came from
- Add "Last Updated" timestamp

Step 4: Standardize and Clean

Unify formats and clean invalid data.

Please standardize contact information:
- Phone format: +86 XXX XXXX XXXX
- Name: Capitalize first letter
- Email: All lowercase
- Remove obviously invalid contacts (e.g., 00000000)
- Remove records with only name and no contact method

Step 5: Export Merged Results

Generate cleaned contact list files.

Please generate two files:
1. ~/contacts/merged_contacts.csv - Merged complete contact list
   Sorted alphabetically by name, include all fields
2. ~/contacts/merge_report.txt - Merge report
   - Original total contact count
   - Number of duplicate groups found
   - Final contact count
   - Number of invalid records removed

Warning: Always backup original files before merging contacts! Some seemingly duplicate contacts might actually be different people (e.g., same name). It's recommended to carefully review merge suggestions before confirming.

Tip: You can ask Claude to convert the merged contact list to vCard format (.vcf) for easy import into phone or email apps.

FAQ

Q: How to determine if two similar names are the same person? A: Besides names, Claude will comprehensively evaluate phone, email, company, and other information. If only names are similar but other info is completely different, it will be flagged as suspicious duplicate requiring manual confirmation.

Q: Can complete information from all sources be kept? A: Yes. You can ask Claude not to delete any information, but merge multiple records for the same person into one, using semicolons to separate multiple phone numbers and emails.

Q: Contact app displays incorrectly after import? A: May be format incompatibility. Tell Claude which app you use (e.g., iOS Contacts, Google Contacts), and it will generate a compatible format.