Contacts

Connect

Press “Connect” beside Contacts on Exporter’s home, then “Open Contacts Folder”. The panel opens in your AddressBook folder, ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook: press “Select This Folder”. Exporter reads only that folder, with no permission prompt, and reads your iCloud and Exchange cards from it too. Then choose where the files go and press “Use This Folder”.

Where the files go

One Markdown file per card, Anna Kowalski.md. Two people with the same name each get a short id suffix, so neither file overwrites the other. A folder right in your home folder, like ~/Documents, gets a contacts-export folder inside it; a deeper one, like ~/Documents/contacts, is used as it is.

“Organize” on the card sets the folder layout, and the path at the end of the same line shows where a card lands:

organize	files land in
one folder	the top of the export folder
by group	groups/<group>/; a card in two groups is written once, under the first
by company	companies/<company>/

Changing it moves the files on the next sync, and the card says so. By group and by company show a tree that ends with “Not in a group” and “No company”; one folder shows the cards, with a recent pill for the 100 most recently changed.

What is exported

The cards ticked on the card, with every field they have. Left out: the email-only entries Gmail collects for every address you wrote to. There is no vCard or CSV export: for a .vcf, use File > Export > Export vCard in Contacts.

Format

Always Markdown.

The file

Each key appears only when the card has a value. List values carry their label, like +1 415 555 0123 (mobile).

key	holds
title	the name
aliases	the nickname and the maiden name
id, source_url	the card’s id, and an addressbook:// link that opens it in Contacts
created, modified	when the card was made and last changed
organization, job_title, department	the work lines
birthday	the birthday
email, phone	the first email and phone, plain, for templates
emails, phones, addresses, urls	every one, with its label
social, im	social profiles and messaging accounts
dates, relationships	other dates and related names, like father: Tom Kowalski
groups	the Contacts groups the card belongs to
conversations	links to the card’s conversations, when Messages is exported too

The body is the name, the job line and the card’s note:

---
title: "Anna Kowalski"
id: "410FE041:ABPerson"
created: 2019-04-02T10:15:33
modified: 2026-08-30T19:02:11
source_url: "addressbook://410FE041:ABPerson"
organization: "Northwind Studio"
job_title: "Art director"
birthday: 1990-12-10
email: "anna@northwind.example"
phone: "+1 415 555 0123"
phones:
  - "+1 415 555 0123 (mobile)"
groups:
  - "Studio"
---

# Anna Kowalski

Art director · Northwind Studio

Met at the print fair.

Free and unlocked

Your first 100 cards among the ones you ticked export and keep syncing free, and a deleted card gives its place back; the rest need the one-time unlock (pricing).

Sync and full resync

After the first “Sync Now”, an edited card rewrites its file while Exporter runs, and a deleted card’s file leaves on the next sync.

“Full Resync” asks first, then removes only the files Exporter wrote, writes every card again and picks the free 100 again. Anything else in the export folder stays.

Problems and fixes

• “no contacts database in that folder (pick the AddressBook folder itself)”: press “Connect” again and select the folder the panel opens in
• files moved into other folders: “Organize” changed. Pick the layout you want and press “Sync Now”
• a card is missing: it is past the free 100, unticked, or an email-only entry from Gmail
• a failed card: last sync shows a red “details” link with the cards that failed and an “open” link to each