Google-contacts – Using the “People” feature of Google Photos to populate Google Contacts photos

As a long time Evolution user, I had the same problem when I got my first Android phone about 18 months ago. The solution I came up with was to first "sync" Evolution to Google Contacts. Then I added my Evolution contacts to the Google Contacts in Evolution. That gave me one unified location for all my contacts. (By the time I did this I had some email addresses in Gmail that weren't in Evolution, and a 10-year-long list of contacts in Evolution that weren't on Google's servers. My Blackberry synced the old fashioned way: A docking cradle and serial jack.)

That said, as you've probably noticed, Google's Contacts are somewhat limited. While you can break your contacts up into "groups" (tags), and even assign one contact to multiple "groups", what you can't do is filter by multiple groups. Say, for example, that some of your contacts are sales prospects. Their core "group" is, of course, "prospects". But being a smart sales person you also use the tags "hot", "warm", and "cold". You can assign your prospect to both "prospects" and "warm", but what you can't do is filter by both "prospects" and "warm" to see a list of contacts that exists only in both "groups". This is a major failing with Google Contacts and, in my opinion, is rather weird since organizing information via tags has become, almost universally, the preferred method.

You'll also notice that all of your Google Contacts now exist in Evolution under "Google", but the "groups" that you created in Google do not carry over to Evolution. So they're there; you can get a all your contacts in Evolution, but they're an unsortable lumped up mess. This seems to be a failing on Novell's part, since on my phone I use DW Contacts and all the "groups" are there, and I can even do "group" based associations. The only work around I've come up with is to make sure that those contacts I may wish to use via Evolution exists both "On This Computer" and on "Google", so that I don't wade through the Google mess more than absolutely necessary to find the contact I want.

I tried it out myself in creating a new contact group and moving my contacts around a bit on Google Contacts. I did notice a few things:

• For a new contact created through the Google Contacts interface (not linked to any Google+) account, you can only group it into the Google Contact groups and not into the Google+ circles。
• For a contact via your Google+ circles, you still have the option to put them into the respective Google Contacts group.

This means that a Google Contacts group can have a mix of the two types of contacts. However, Google+ circles can only contain people from Google+ and not people that you have add through the "New contact" form in Google Contacts. As for the difference, I can only say that it is a technical difference (and limitation).

I would suggest keeping to the old Google Contacts groups as there is some use of it if you synced the contacts to your Android phone. It makes it easier for you to find your contacts using a custom group that you might have created using it and even add new contacts that do not have an account on Google+.

The Google+ circles are mainly for use by Google+ and possibly Gmail, but the groupings doesn't really have any effect, it only changes how you "group your friends".