Hello,
I am new to NC and technically not really advanced.
Scenario:
I have tons of contacts in my Android mobile phone and all of them have nice contact photos. Currently they all are synced with an online adressbook (I want to get away from that internet storage of my contacts).
Now I want to initially fill my NC-contacts with all those existing contacts including the contact photos.
I tried linking the Android phone via DAVx5 and that somehow works, but effectively not.
Simply because it seems to assume that I want to sync NC-contacts oubound into my phone initially and so creates a brandnew second adressbook on the phone which then also is empty.
I do want to push my phone data into NC initially and then later continue syncing.
I do know I can export the contacts data into a file and then import it into NC, but so far I only seem to be able to get the text data and nothing of the embedded photos.
Anyone here with a tip how I can load my existing contacts with all contact images into NC?
Hello @Gorf wlecome to Nextcloud forum! take a look at the search - you will find number of similar questions. There is also a way to migrate all your data from Goggle to Nextcloud.
I have no experience with Google contacts but I successfully imported contacts from Exchange/Outlook with pictures (unfortunately I had to convert the original v2 version to v3 of vcf using external tool - see details)
DAVx5 works as designed, which means it always creates new address books. You need to export your default Android address book to a vcf file and re-import it into the new address book which DAVx5 has created. Due to the fact that photos a stored within the vcf file they usually get imported without any problems.
Ok, thanks for the hints. I will now describe what was my problem and how it was solved for others that run into similar situations.
Solution:
Yes, making a snapshot export of existing adress data out from the android phone via simple contacts app and then immediately importing it into NC and then syncing works.
Problems / caveats:
My initial question was influenced by two things:
a) I did export my contacts from one of my email providers (GMX) and while on the UI there all contacts have photos, GMX exports just the text content. I did assume that was caused by .vcf file format limitations (wrong).
b) I did export my contacts from the google contacts app on my Xiaomi phone. There the file size did show that photos must now be in there, but: NC was unable to import this .vcf file. About 1/3 of entries were empty now/missing. There was even import errors.
c) I then used the “simple contacts” App to export the contact on the phone. This .vcf file now I could import without any issues and it did include the photos. Interestingly the simple contacts export file is about 20% smaller than the google contacts export file (but still has all contacts in there. Since in a very few cases the photo has been lost I now do wonder if there are some issues with some embedded photo images (wrong size? wrong format?).