Contacts is one of the applications that comes with macOS and makes it pretty easy to manage the information of people with whom you connect by any of several different channels.

You can store and sync contacts with various accounts where you might also do email or keep a calendar, create groups to email en masse, and more.

However, Contacts doesn’t do everything incredibly. While it can resolve duplicates quite well, it requires a lot of point-and-clicking to act on any contact, such as calling someone, showing them on a map, or copying their info.

Merge & Resolve Duplicates

Resolving duplicates is one of the easiest commands in Contacts yet very few clients know it exists until I reveal it. Just choose Look for Duplicates… from the Card menu.

Contacts will scan your database for entries with the same name and offer to merge their info into one card. It will also find cards with duplicate info and remove the extras.

Even among thousands of contacts, this powerful command can complete in a jiffy.

Learn more about this process in Dedupe Your Contacts.

CardHop

Last year, Flexibits, the developer behind the the popular calendar app Fantastical, introduced CardHop, which runs in the menubar and makes it super simple to look up, add, edit, and act on contacts.

CardHop uses a natural language interface to easily capture a contact’s name, emails, phones, addresses, and other info, and even have them tagged properly, such as “home” or “work.”

You can also initiate an email message to a contact, show their address on a map, and even call them and route the call through your Mac.

Syncing iCloud & Gmail

Do you rely on opening Gmail in a web browser some of the time, even when you mostly use it in Mail on Mac and/or iPhone? You might be a good customer for Synctastic, a utility that can keep your iCloud and Gmail contacts—and groups!—in sync.

Synctastic runs in the background and periodically checks to see if the same set of contacts and groups exists in both your iCloud and Gmail accounts. That way, you’ll never be stuck with missing contacts whether you’re on your own devices or someone else’s.