Copy contacts from outlook to gmail

To transfer your contacts from Outlook to Gmail and keep the pictures, you need to export them as vCard files (vcf) and then import them into Google Contacts. However, Outlook does not support exporting multiple contacts as vCard files at once and neither does Google Contacts support importing multiple vCard files at once. You can use a workaround to export your contacts in batches and then combine them into a single file. Here are the steps:

1. Open Outlook (the windows client) 
2. (Optional) If you are using non Eglish characters, you need to change the preferred encoding of outlook to save vCards as Unicode (UTF-8), otherwise gmail won't import them correctly.
   
   
   
   
   
3. Navigate to the Contacts folder.
4. Select the contacts you want to export. You can use Ctrl+click or Shift+click to select multiple contacts.
5. From the ribbon, choose Forward Contact -> As a Business Card. This will create a new email message with the vCard files attached.
   
   
   
   
   
   
6. If nothing happens for a long time or you get a memory exception, repeat step 4, selecting fewer contacts. In my case, I had to batch them in groups of 50 contacts.
7. Once the new email message opens, select all attachments by right clicking in one of them and selecting "Select All" (or use the Ctrl+A shortcut) and then right click again to select the "Save As" to save all vCards to a folder on your computer.
   
   
   
   
   
8. Repeat steps 4-7 for the rest of your contacts until you have exported all of them as vCard files.
9. Combine all the vCard files into a single file. To do that, open a command prompt window and navigate to the folder where you saved the vCard files. Type copy *.vcf all_contacts.vcf and press Enter. This will create a new file called all_contacts.vcf that contains all your contacts.
10. Log in to your Google account and go to Google Contacts.
11. Click on Import and then select the file all_contacts.vcf from your computer.
12. Click Import again to confirm.

You have successfully imported your contacts from Outlook to Gmail. Gmail tags them with an “Imported on” label, which was a lifesaver while I was experimenting with the vCard encoding. It is unfortunate that migrating contacts between Outlook and Gmail is that complicated...