Does Google Contacts have a way to remove a specific field from all my contacts?

Question

Over the years, the profiles in my Google Contacts have accumulated a few fields that I'd like to remove. They're all identifiers that made it easier for outside apps to manage my contacts: Google Plus, Sync.Me, and CoSy. (The later two synchronized info and photos from Facebook.)

I'd like to do a mass remove of any field that matches what I'm looking for. CoSy ID#s are listed as Chat fields, but are labeled as "CoSy", so they should be easy to search for. G+ and Sync.Me are just listed as web sites, but they have their domain names in each entry, so that should be easy to search for too.

I'm pretty sure I can't do this within the Contacts interface, but maybe there's a method or tool out there that I can use.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Try exporting the Contacts as a "Google CSV" file (that is, a CSV file with the fields that GCal wants to import), then processing it in a spreadsheet tool, and importing back into GCal.

A spreadsheet should be able to delete columns from the CSV file and maybe run a script over the values in a column.

If that's not capable enough, you could:

• Write a Python program that uses the csv module to load the file, do any processing you want, and write a new csv file.
• Look into command line csv tools.
• Write a JavaScript (App Script) program using the Contacts API or the newer Advanced People Service API.