[Macworld]

Post your comments for How to share family contacts here

[sbaalgmc]

I keep wondering when Apple will lead the charge in making sharing items among a household as simple as it can and should be. Why not a simple check box for "share this with my spouse/family, etc?" For all of Apple's industry leading methods of making things "just work," trying to share music, contacts, calendars, and other items in a single household is still ridiculously complicated.

[zbell]

I must say I was optimistic when I read the title of this article... I thought there was an actual (read "intended by Apple") solution to share contacts (or anything for that matter) between Apple IDs in a household that I had missed. The solution in this article, while technically possible is, unfortunately, somewhat of a hack and a hassle. More complicated than it should be, and messy when/if Apple finally does solve the issue of household sharing.

I'm not faulting this article for trying to offer an alternative method, it's just very frustrating anyone should have to resort to doing something like this in the first place. So, I guess I'm blaming Apple.

Apple ID management is where Apple could/should be focussing their attentions. Instead, they just keep heaping on more and more services without addressing the underlying issues associated with Apple IDs: sharing, families, merging, enterprise management, etc.

/rant

[NickT]

Hi Chris,
If I could offer another alternative, my wife and I use the following solution:
- I have a me.com apple ID
- my wife has a gmail one
- we use my me.com for contacts
- she signs into iCloud in Settings on her iPhone using her Gmail apple ID
- she then adds my me.com iCloud account as an extra mail account, ticking only Contacts for syncing

[Albemarle]

Hi Chris,
We find it frustrating that in IOS the first iCloud account can do Passbook, Photo Stream and Documents and the others cannot. I had hoped that with Photostream sharing, this would solve our problems, but since it's a manual sharing, it doesn't.
So we have both our accounts on both our devices with my iCloud account as the main one on both iPhones so we can share the Photostream.
Any suggestions for automating Photostream sharing?

[NickT]

Quote

Hi Chris, We find it frustrating that in IOS the first iCloud account can do Passbook, Photo Stream and Documents and the others cannot. I had hoped that with Photostream sharing, this would solve our problems, but since it's a manual sharing, it doesn't. So we have both our accounts on both our devices with my iCloud account as the main one on both iPhones so we can share the Photostream. Any suggestions for automating Photostream sharing?

Albemarle,
My wife and I actually just stopped sharing our PhotoStream, as we could not individually place comments or 'likes' on Shared PhotoStreams (all comments were from "Nick", which is jarring to say the least). As fun as sharing our PhotoStream was before Shared PhotoStreams came along, for us it's better to have separate Streams, and manually share the good shots..
I agree with you though, it would be great if we could share 'Our' PhotoStream' and still comment on Shared Streams as ourselves..

[toddcurry]

Is this a problem that Automator / AppleScript could solve:
1. Assign contact to group "Shared"
2. Automator looks at modified date: if modified in last day and in Shared, send contact to Sally
3. Assign automator to calendar to have it run every night at midnight

I haven't tried this, just raising it as a suggestion.

TC

[JerryNaples]

I followed the instructions and was able to create a shared iCloud in Contacts

I've discovered an issue, for me at least, that can cause a problem

I often import revised vCards to replace existing ones. Normally Contacts tells me it is a duplicate and offers choices on what to do (merge, old, new, both) before the import

What I've found is that If I am showing the ALL Contacts set (instead of my normal iCloud subset) then Contacts asks if I want to import the NEW vCards and apparently puts the card into the Shared set.

Jerry

[swdickie]

I shared my contacts with my husband and he recently found a problem with old data. Now I know why, syncing doesn't work anymore. He can't edit the bad data or delete the card.

Any suggestions for how to get rid of previously shared contacts on his computer?