How to upload phone contacts to GMail

[o_swas]

Hello,

My wife has the Epic 4G. When she got it she had all of the contacts from her old phone transferred to the Epic.

It seems that those contacts that were imported from her phone are placed under the "phone" contacts rather than "Google" contacts, so they are not synced with her Gmail account. There are over 200 of them and most of them have pictures associated with the contact.

Is there a way to upload the contacts from the phone into the Gmail, while still preserving the picture of the individual contact? It looks like I can export the contacts to the SD card and upload that file to Gmail, but I'm assuming that the contact pictures are lost then.

Any method is appreciated. Is there an app that will do it?

I think her phone needs a factory reset and I don't want to have to type all of her contacts in by hand before I take it to be reset.

Thank you for your help!!

-Ryan

 

[Jaggrey]

I'm not sure about preserving the contact pictures, but you could export then import the contacts and see if the pictures go with them. Otherwise I'm not sure how to maintain the pictures.

 

[regenouis]

Pictures will be maintained on the SD card...and while syncing to google is a phenomenal idea, especially after the fiasco with Amazon's cloud crashing I have an inherent need for some kind of more local, physical backup and highly suggest to all our customers when they come in to back up to the SD card, it's incredibly easy, and as long as you take care of your SD card you don't have to worry about any cloud losing your data.

(to save contacts it's just contacts>menu>import/export/export to SD card)

 

[o_swas]

Pictures will be maintained on the SD card...and while syncing to google is a phenomenal idea, especially after the fiasco with Amazon's cloud crashing I have an inherent need for some kind of more local, physical backup and highly suggest to all our customers when they come in to back up to the SD card, it's incredibly easy, and as long as you take care of your SD card you don't have to worry about any cloud losing your data.

(to save contacts it's just contacts>menu>import/export/export to SD card)

When you say that pictures are maintained on the SD card, do you mean that they are maintained when the contacts are exported to the SD card? Or are they stored separately elsewhere?

When I export the contacts what is the file name on the SD card?

Thank you!

 

[regenouis]

When you say that pictures are maintained on the SD card, do you mean that they are maintained when the contacts are exported to the SD card? Or are they stored separately elsewhere?

When I export the contacts what is the file name on the SD card?

Thank you!

Pictures are saved on the SD card period, with the exception of pictures via text message, those you have to tell to save to your SD card (usually just hold down on the picture for a sec and a separate menu will pop up and you can select "save attachment to SD card".

In so far as file name on your SD card it is "contacts.db" and you need root access to get to it, annnnd on top of that it's not an easy file to find, and generally I wouldn't really suggest messing with it, unless you know what you're doing and have a specific purpose for playing around with it.

If you just need to import them back in to your phone, or into a backup phone (has to be android, and has to be updated to 2.1 at the least if I remember correctly) it's the same process contacts>menu>import/export>import from SD card. When you export them it gives you the option of google or phone (I always export both google and phone contacts when I show it to customers, just in case something happens to the G-mail account that prevents you from gaining access to those contacts), when importing them it gives you the same options.

Note: careful when importing Gmail contacts if you do still have access to the sync option with your contacts that are in Gmail, as I have seen it create duplicates.

Edit: Sorry, just re-read your original post and see I misread the picture question. I've noticed that with my contacts the pictures stayed in place when I exported them to my SD card, and I've flashed whole new roms to my device and wiped my phone, and re-installed the original kernal more times than I care to admit out loud

Hope this helps!
Will

 

[o_swas]

OK, I exported the contacts to the SD card as a .vcf file. I was able to upload the .vcf file into Gmail contacts (yay!) however the contact's picture was not included (boo).

Does anybody know of a way, or an app, that I can use to move the phone contacts into Gmail while including the contact pictures?

 

[Jaggrey]

I haven't tried this on my Epic, but on my friend's Thunderbolt, when you're importing the pictures it gives you the option of where to store them: on the phone or on Google. I would think that the Epic would do this as well, then you could import them and the phone would automatically sync them with Google as well as bringing the pictures over. Again I haven't tried it so it would be a trial and error thing.