Transferring a number of contact records from an iPhone into Google Contacts can be a bit of a pain as the iPhone does not offer a way of easily extracting a batch of contact details in one fell swoop. I needed to get quite a few contacts from an iPhone into Google Contacts and to do this I ended up doing the following using my Mac:

  1. Export individual contacts from the iPhone by "sharing" them one at a time, this generated a series of vCard (.vcf) files.
  2. Save all the .vcf files into a single folder.
  3. Open a Terminal window and navigate to the folder where the .vcf files are stored.
  4. Enter the following Terminal command: cat *.vcf > combined.vcf
  5. This generates a single .vcf file called "combined.vcf" - or whatever name you choose to give your file.
  6. Using the Import feature in Google Contacts import the "combined.vcf" file.
  7. This process will generate all the individual contacts as individual Google Contact records which can then be edited.

Whilst having to export the contacts from the iPhone individually was a bit of a nuisance the approach above saved me a lot of time in terms of the import process and gave me control of the new contacts as they were initially auto-tagged with a label "Imported On ddmmyyyy" which made the group very easy to work on.