This Mac App I Want To Like Does Something I Need To Do But I Don’t Like How It Does It

Free is free, right? As much as I hate to admit it, both Carol and I have a few accounts with Apple’s 21st century nemesis. Google.

Gmail, Calendar, and Reader grace our Macs. As a card carrying member of the Apple elite, I’m not proud that. But, like I said, free is free. So, I grab a clever little Mac app to sync my OS X Contacts To Google’s Gmail. What’s not to like?

Sync Me, Baby, One More Time

The idea behind free is to keep costs down. So, me and Google have this symbiotic relationship. They give me free web applications to use and I give them access to mine my data for fun and profit.

Until recently we have managed to keep both of our Google accounts separate, and, actually separate from our Mac email, Calendar, and Contacts.

Then I got a hairbrained idea to consolidate efforts, and use Google’s services as a dumb backup option.

Enter Contacts Sync For Google Gmail, an inexpensive Mac app which should sync Gmail and Mac contacts in some kind of 2-way symbiosis.

After all CSGG has good reviews, doesn’t cost much, comes with a long list of useful features, and should fulfill my sync and backup requirement.

Most of the time it does just that.

Click on the image above for a larger, pop up view with more details.

Contacts Sync for Google Gmail (hereinafter referred to as CSGG, to help me avoid a repetitive stress injury while typing) is straightforward to setup and use.

CSGG walks you through the step-by-step. Enter your Gmail account information. Select the type of sync, language, and a few other basics.

Then, click the Begin Sync button. CSGG grabs data from your Mac’s Contacts and from Gmail and presents you with the above list of contacts for final approval.

CSGG syncs groups, syncs deletions, syncs additions, sync photos, and manages to handle custom labels and fields (names, nicknames, phone numbers, web page addresses and all the other stuff and cruft that Contacts collects over the years).

Our Macs have well over a thousand contact names and getting them synchronized took just a few minutes, so, job well done, right? Almost. CSGG wouldn’t sync up changes to photos in contacts. Contact data would sync up fine. Not the photos. I don’t know if it’s a caching issue or a bug. But this part I don’t like.

Other than that, it works well, costs little, and gives us another online backup to our Mac’s Contacts (already backed up in iCloud).

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