Send & Share Contacts Easily from Mac OS X

The Contacts app in OS X makes sharing the contact information of anyone in your address book extremely simple, and if you have iCloud enabled you can share any address from your phone right from your Mac, without reaching for the iPhone itself:

• Open Contacts in OS X and choose the contact you want to share
• Click the [>] Arrow button in the lower portion of Contacts to access sharing options, choose Message, Email, or AirDrop
• Include a message alongside the contact if desired, then choose “Send”

The files being sent out are vcard formatted, meaning just about anything will be able to read the information, whether it’s another Mac, iPhone, Windows PC, Android, Blackberry, or whatever.

Everything will be handled right through Contacts, unless you have Gmail or webmail configured as your default Mail client in OS X and choose the Email option, which will upload the vcard to the appropriate webmail client instead.

If you choose the iMessage feature and the recipient has iMessage configured with their Mac, iPhone, or iOS device properly, they’ll be able to immediately import the contact right into their Contacts list in iOS just by tapping on it, just like sharing Contacts between iPhones.

Using the email option and sending the vcard to yourself can also be a way of preserving an individual contact that you’ll otherwise be deleting from your contacts list, forming a one-off backup for that individual, though if you’re looking to backup an entire address book there are better ways to do that in bulk.