How to migrate from Google Contacts to Contact Book

Every standard Google field has a target in our schema. Names + nicknames map to data.name. Email goes to data.email. Multiple phone numbers all land - we keep them all, with the first marked primary. Postal addresses, birthdays, anniversaries, organization + title, notes, and tags ("labels") all import cleanly.

Photos don't import - Google CSV exports as a base64-encoded blob that's lossy at scale, and most users have unflattering bursts from years past. Re-add the ones that matter manually. Custom Google labels become tags. Contact groups become tags too - we deliberately don't ship a separate "groups" concept; tags do the same job with less mental overhead.

Most Google contact lists have accumulated junk over the years - one-off email signatures, support contacts that auto-saved, dead numbers. The first thirty minutes inside Contact Book are well spent on a sweep. Use the search field to surface obvious culprits ("@noreply", "support", "do-not-reply") and delete in bulk. It's also a good moment to set up tags and segments that will keep your list navigable long-term.

Google's export dialog offers three formats and the choice matters. Google CSV is the right answer for migrating into a personal CRM: it's UTF-8, one row per contact, and every field is a named column that maps cleanly. Outlook CSV uses a Windows code page that mangles non-English characters (umlauts, accents) and is only worth it if your destination is genuinely Microsoft. vCard (.vcf) is the format to pick only when you're moving to Apple Contacts and want photos to travel - it carries the photo blob, but it's awkward to open in a spreadsheet and most CRMs parse it less reliably than CSV.

If you ever want to check the mapping by hand, here's what lands where. Google writes one wide row per contact with repeated columns for multiples (E-mail 1 - Value, E-mail 2 - Value, …); our importer collapses each group into a list and marks the first as primary.

Long Google lists almost always carry duplicates - the same person saved once from Gmail and once from your phone, often with different spellings. The cleanest fix is to dedupe before you import: open the CSV in Google Sheets, sort by email, and where two rows share an address keep the one with more filled fields. After the import, our duplicate finder catches the rest by matching email + phone, and you merge with one click - the merge keeps every email, number, and note from both sides rather than discarding one. A tidy list is what makes the follow-up reminders you set next actually trustworthy.

Worth being clear about: importing the CSV copies your contacts across once. It does not keep Google and Contact Book in sync afterwards - a number you change in Gmail next month won't update here, and vice versa. That's deliberate. A personal CRM is where you keep the rich, private layer (the notes, the cadences, the history), and you don't want that quietly overwritten by a sync from a system that doesn't hold any of it. If you add a batch of new people in Google later, just export and import again; imports are tagged by source, so a second import won't silently double everyone. Most people find that once their relationship memory lives here, Google Contacts goes back to being just the phone's address book. (New to the idea? Start with what a personal CRM actually is.)