How do I sync contacts between 2 iCloud accounts?

I need to sync my contact list with my husband's phone. We both have our own iCloud accounts.

Solution 1:

The easiest way to do this as a one time thing, is to open Contacts.app on a Mac that is set up on your iCloud account. Select all contacts and drag them to the desktop. That will export them all as a .vcard file.

Then move the file to another account on a Mac set up with your husband's iCloud account. Open Contacts.app, and drag the .vcard file into the app.

That will get all of your contacts into his account. But this will be a one time thing, and you may get some duplicates.

Solution 2:

To my knowledge, iCloud will not do this between two separate iCloud accounts. You can pursue one of the following two options:

Option 1

1. Create an additional AppleID for contact/calendar sync only. Add that account to your devices but don't sign in yet.
2. You will not be able to use your own AppleID and the additional AppleID you just created concurrently.
3. On each persons computer, drag your contacts to your desktop to create vcard files. Log out of the personal account.
4. Login to the 3rd AppleID (shared).
5. Drag the vcard files into the Contacts.app which will add them to the app. Repeat this process on any additioanal computer that wants to share the list. This is the contact (and calendar) you will use going forward. You can still keep a private contact list under your original AppleID but you will need to logout and back into that ID when you want to access the private contacts.
6. Once you are done remove the duplicates or merge the contacts and any private contacts you don't want in the list. There are several additional apps that will do this for you. Just do a search on the internet for one that suits you.

Option 2

Setup a Google account that you both use for contacts and sync with that. This method is not optimal because in either scenario you will end up with all contacts included in the set and because there's always a chance that some future update to googles apps this method may cause problems in the future.