How to transfer Android contacts to Gmail account

Anoop Verma

LOSING or damaging a smartphone can be a real nightmare for anyone, not only because the device is quite costly, but also because we are now storing lot of personal information in our devices. The contact information that is there in the smartphone is of crucial importance. Many of us could have the phone numbers and other details of more than thousand people in our smartphone. If the smartphone is lost, we lose all the valuable information.

To limit the damage in case of the loss or damage of a smartphone, we should start uploading our contacts data to the cloud. If you are using an Android phone, then the best way of backing up your contacts is through your personal Gmail account. All you need to do is log into your Gmail account through your Android phone. Once you do this, any existing contacts from that account will get synced with your device.

Since the contacts get automatically synced, if you delete a contact from your device, it will also be deleted from Gmail contacts, which will also remove it from other places, such as ‘Google Chat’. This is a rather convenient system of managing your contacts, but if you don’t do it carefully, you could face the problem of too many duplicate contacts in your account.

Syncing contacts from Gmail account can lead to lot of duplication in case you have some of your contacts listed in the device as well as in the Gmail account.

In order to handle this problem, you can begin by merging all your contacts within your Gmail account before actually transferring them to your Android. It is better to merge contacts in Gmail, as the laptop or PC works faster than any Android. You begin by manually transferring all your Android contacts to your Gmail account. You can do this by first backing your contacts to the removable SD card in your mobile. This can be done by the
following steps:
1.Open Contacts
2.Click menu > Import/Export
3.Export to SD card, then click OK to confirm

After this you can connect your mobile to your laptop and copy the CSV file from the SD card to your computer. Now you can log into the web version of your Gmail account and take the following steps:

1. Click Gmail at the top-left corner of your Gmail page, then choose contacts.
2. From the more actions dropdown menu, select import.
3.Click the choose file button.
4.Select the file you’d like to upload and click the import button. 

Once the list of contacts from your mobile have been uploaded to your Gmail account, you can click the more button and select “Find and merge duplicates” option from the menu. This will enable you to merge all those duplicate listings with one click, or you can be more discriminating by expanding and checking off contacts individually.

After few minutes you will have a clean list of contacts in your Gmail account. Now you can delete all your contacts from the Android device to prevent any confusion. You can do this by going to contacts, click on menu, select all and finally choosing the delete option.

Once your Android device is clean, you can use the device to log into your Gmail account, and import all the contact data. If you mistakenly import multiple times, then you are going to end up with a huge amount of duplicates in your contacts data. You can also try to solve this problem in Android by using the ‘Find and Merge Duplicates’ options in the ‘Contacts Menu’.