How can I duplicate a contact on my MacBook Pro?

I thought this should be obvious, until I tried it and found this is actually easier said than done, thanks to Contacts' 'smarts'.

Here's what I came up with

Contacts has the ability to maintain multiple contacts databases - you might have a local list of contacts on your machine, another list synched via iCloud, as well as a corporate contacts list from your employer.

Contacts tries to optimize this by combining the same contact from different directories into the same contact card, so if you have 'John Doe' in your local contacts, your iCloud contacts, and your employee directory, you'll just see one entry with tags indicating that the person appears in multiple directories.

Here's a snippet from one of my contacts that appears in both the local account and my iCloud directory:

The 'Cards' section is missing if the contact only appears once, but does show if they're in more than 1 directory.

So, now to the crux of the issue - namely you are able to copy a contact, but when you paste them back in (to duplicate the contact), Contacts recognizes that they're already in your directory system, and just creates a new 'card' for them.

Conceptually, that's probably OK most of the time, but I'm assuming you're duplicating the contact because you want to change some of the details... maybe add family members who all have the same address, for example.

There are two ways around this, and neither are ideal.

The first is to double-paste. The trick here is subtle, but I'll try to explain.

Let's say you have a contact 'John Doe' that is in your iCloud-synced contacts. Copy them

Immediately Paste. Now they get a second 'card' that's merged with the first - one in iCloud, and one local.

Now Paste again. This time, while Contacts would normally create a new local contact, it recognizes that one already exists, so it creates a whole new contact card. You can then edit this second-pasted copy at will.

Once done you can edit the original to delete the second 'card'.

If none of that makes sense, just try double-pasting and see what you get :)

The other option, which may be easier/safer is to export the contact(s) as CSV, edit their details (either in a spreadsheet or a text-editing app), then import the records for the new contacts.

Neither solution is ideal, but it seems to be geared around Contacts trying to avoid having two cards for the same contact.