Address Book: how to review duplicate before merging

Question

If I remember correctly Address Book used to have the facility to review duplicated information before doing something with it. In Apple's infinite wisdom they seem to have removed this feature and now expect us to trust Address Book to merge duplicated info.
Is there any way around this? Is there any 3rd party software that will do a better job?

Answer 1

This one, run in Script Editor, will list in the results pane any duplicates it finds based on name. You can uncomment the delete part, but I prefer to just use it for finding them. It has been posted before, and some people have found it doesn't work for them, others have found it helps. What I do is run it from time to time, review the duplicates it finds - typically two eg John Smiths who are actually two separate contacts - and fix any that need fixing, and then let Address Book look for dups and see if I can work out why it still finds the odd one.
AK
click here to open this script in your editor<pre style="font-family: 'Monaco', 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; overflow:auto; color: #222; background: #DDD; padding: 0.2em; font-size: 10px; width:400px">tell application "Address Book"
set TheLot to {}
set Surplus to {}
set ThePeople to every person
repeat with APerson in ThePeople
if name of APerson is not in TheLot then
set TheLot to TheLot & (name of APerson)
else
set Surplus to Surplus & (name of APerson)
-- delete APerson
end if
end repeat
end tell
Surplus</pre>