Adding Contacts in Address book on Mac

TidBITS Talk
1

Trying to add contact. Get the name in and before able to add next field looses name and not able to add contacts. Works fine on iPhone. What could be the issue?

2

I haven’t used Address Book or Contacts knowingly on Mac or i(x)OS in a long time, but wanted to suggest a few more generalized possibilities, maybe they help with the issue or with others to solve it.

  • You refer to Address Book, I thought that name went away some macOSes ago iirc. Possibly if the Mac and iPhone are on different OSes that might be related
  • Others might be able to confirm-contradict but possibly as soon as when you’re typing in a field, the Mac is already checking with iCloud. So if your Contacts are syncing with iCloud, and there is some mismatch or internet connection spotty or some glitch with the Apple Account or devices are signed in with different Accounts that might be something
  • I take it you’ve done the usual quit and relaunch app, shut down and boot the Mac etc and that hasn’t helped
  • If tempted to do so, use caution in troubleshooting by signing in/out of Apple Account. Way back it was an easy simple troubleshooting step but now it is much scarier and doesn’t honor previous iCloud settings when logging back in (in my experience); I defer 1,000% to the iCloud experts here though
  • Maybe a long shot but perhaps something to do with input settings of the keyboard, ie how you are moving between fields, by Tab key, Enter key, Arrow keys, clicking; if the Input Source has changed, might be something, if you’re using a wired keyboard maybe the connection is not tight, if wireless maybe something there ie battery strength, signal interference etc.

Anyway I can see the frustration and wanted to offer some ideas. They might all be wrong but if one helps then was worth posting…

3

Perhaps not much help but I have had similar experiences when I try to add and it has often been I haven’t selected the right account to add the contact to. I have my AppleID account, and family AppleID account, and my MS365 contacts all visible in the Contacts app. Poor account selection has driven me nuts for bit until I figured it out.

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4

Thanks Earl!

Turns out it was the account issue. Never knew about that feature in the setup menu. Just enabled all my accounts and now I can add contacts and all accounts see them.

5

Wait, what? Just as a point of curiosity (I’m not the OP nor use Contacts), but how does the Mac know which account a new Contact entry belongs to? Sorry to be so duh…

6

My limited testing suggests that it Contacts picks the account selected in the often hidden sidebar. If “all accounts” is selected, it seems to go to the signed in AppleID’s account. I have had a few experiences where changing what is selected in the sidebar allows me to add something that was blocked. I have no direct evidence or theory why, just anecdotal..

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7

Address Book and, later, Contacts in macOS have driven me mad for years – I thought it was just me!

I only have one Account activated – my iCloud account.

More often than not, if I try to create a new contact, I get one of two problems:

  1. After entering information in two or three fields, the entry suddenly disappears.
  2. If I want to create an entry in an existing group, I select that group in the sidebar and then click the Plus button. This doesn’t create a new contact but instead enters Edit mode for the first entry in the list.

These two issues have been around for me for about ten years. I get no similar problems using my iPhone.

I’m fully up to date with my OS (Tahoe 26.5). The only reason I haven’t tried to do anything about the issues is that simply quitting and restarting the app fixes both of them for a while. But I have cursed the issue literally hundreds of times.

8

On all of my Apple devices, I’ve had the disappearing-entry-after-edit problem too, for a long time. I’ve never been motivated enough to troubleshoot it, though, because quitting and restarting Contacts makes the contact entry reappear with the edits present.

9

While I have my accounts all enabled, I have the problem of the disappearing entry only when I’m already in a group. If I enter a new contact while in “All Contacts”, there are no issues. The problem I have is then sliding the name of the new contact into a group, where it won’t go into the group. I often have to close and re-open the program to have it work. Drives me nuts, but it does work, and everything always syncs up with all my other devices instantly.