How to Download and Upload Contacts in Gmail?

The Google Contact App allows you to save all your contacts including names, email and phone numbers among other details from your Gmail account. This can be helpful when you need seamless access to your contacts across your various devices or web services. You can sync your smartphone or another email service with your Gmail to access your contact on the go. Besides, you can download your Gmail contact to your PC, or upload a file with multiple contacts to your Gmail. This posts will show you how you can download, upload and manage Gmail contacts.

Open Google Contact App

The Google Contact app allows you to view and manage your Gmail contacts. You can open the app using Google Contacts page, when you are logged into your account. Alternatively, you can do so from your Gmail dashboard:

Sign in to your Gmail account.
Click the “Google apps” icon on the upper-right corner of the dashboard and select “Contacts”. This will open the contact page in a new tab.

How to Download Gmail Contacts?

From the contact page, you can download part or all your contacts in CSV or vCard formats. If you need to download selected contacts, you can tick the box against the specific entries. For the whole contact list, go straight to the steps.

Expand the “More” menu on the left sidebar and then click “Export”.

From the resulting pop-up, select the contacts you want to download.
Under “Export as” select your preferred format and click the “Export” button to download.

Another alternative is to select all the contacts and then click on the more actions icon (3 vertical dots) located just below the search box.
And choose “Export” from the options.

Select a folder to store the contact file and click “Save”.

Once the file download completes, you can open and edit using any application that can read the .csv file format including Microsoft Excel and Google Spreadsheet.

For the .vcf format, you can use Outlook or any other vCard viewer.

How to Upload Gmail Contacts?

First, you need to prepare your contacts in a CSV or copy a Vcard containing the contacts from your Android or iPhone device. To avoid issues when uploading contacts you need to ensure that:

The contacts are in a format that Google format can read (.csv or .cvf). It is advisable to download a CSV file from Gmail and use it as a template.
You upload a maximum of 3000 entries at a time.
You Gmail contact list does not exceed the 25,000 contacts limit.
Edit and save your contacts and then open the Gmail contact page.
Under “More” located on the left panel of the page, select the “Import” option.
On the pop-up dialogue, click the “Select file” button.

This opens another window so that you can pick the contact file from your PC storage.
Select the .csv or .vcf file and click “Open”.

Now click the “Import” button to upload contacts. You will get a notification once all the contacts have been uploaded.

Managing Your Gmail Contacts

If you upload contacts that are already saved in Gmail contacts, the contact app keeps both copies. However, you can merge the duplicates to maintain a single and fully updated entry of each contact. This can be useful if you surpass the allowed Gmail contacts limit and cannot upload more.

To merge duplicates, click on “Duplicates” on the left panel menu.

Then on the right-side pane, click “Merge all” to combine all the duplicates into a single entry.
You may also choose to examine the contacts and click the “Merge” button below each contact to merge them one at a time.

Another way of managing Gmail contacts is by use of “Labels” to group the contacts into various categories. Gmail allows you to create contacts labels and add contacts to the new label.

Use the “Create label” button to add a new category.
To add a contact to a category, select the contact, go to the labels option and click on your preferred label.

Summary

Gmail contacts allow you to maintain a similar copy of your contacts with names, emails and other contact details for all your devices. When you buy a new mobile device, whether iPhone or Android phone, you can sync the device with your Gmail account to access the contacts. Moreover, you can download a copy of Gmail contacts in the .csv file and upload it to another account or email services such as Outlook. Gmail also allows you to upload multiple contacts saved in a CSV or a Vcard file.

How to Download and Upload Contacts in Gmail?