Google

2011-01-30

Android Google Contacts: "Other Contacts"

I bought a pair of Google Nexus S phones for my wife and myself. As I use Google for my pics, contacts, docs, e-mail etc, I love the device!  Integration to all the Google services are done by simply entering your Google account the first time you power on your Android device.

I've been spending some time on Google App Market and other app sites like AppBrain.com and AndroidTapp.com to find out the apps that I need, as well as getting tips from friends who are either Android users or know about cross-platform (i.e. Blackberry - iPhone - Android) apps.

Today, while tinkering with a cross-platform messaging app named "WhatsApp", I noticed that some of my contacts were not showing up on the phone. That seemed weird. I checked Google.com/contacts and noticed that they were  showing up under "Other Contacts" instead of "My Contacts". I have the option to move them but I do not know who else is in the "Other Contacts" category.

I wondered what caused this and upon a little google'ing, I found out that both Gmail and Picasa creates accounts under "Other Contacts". Picasa has always been problematic when it came to sync'ing with Google Contacts for me. Apparently, Picasa had a bug in v3.8 and that caused all this mess. Issue is fixed in Picasa so that it does not now keep on moving contacts to "other contacts" but the damage is done. Comparing the number of "All contacts" to "My Contacts", I figured out that I am missing about ~100 contacts. They have also been removed from the groups I had created.

If worse comes to worst, I will need to export both lists and write a PowerShell script to figure out the delta that I have to move back and regroup them. Publish Post

I love Picasa but always had two gripes with it:

  • Face Recognition is excruciatingly slow when # of pics are large(have more than 50K pics) and not so intelligent (hello, I just tagged the same person 10 times already for the pics that were taken minutes apart, do the rest please?)
  • Cannot write the tagged info into the pic (have to use a third party tool called AvPicFaceXMPTagger)

Adding to the list: I really do not need other apps to mess with my Google contacts!