if by design

Having spent the day importing and sorting my contacts in Highrise I was annoyed to find that the vCard export didn’t include images. I didn’t fancy the prospect of having to go through each contact and manually export their photograph so I created a script to do it for me.

The following Ruby script uses Highrise’s API to export vCards with the photographs intact ready for Mac OS X Address Book.

Ingredients

To make this script work you will need:

• Highrise account
• Mac OS X Address Book
• Ruby
• Ruby Gems
• The script itself - highrise_to_vcard.rb

Step 1: Backup

It’s a good idea to backup your Address Book before starting this process. Just in case anything goes wrong!

Step 2: Gems

The script requires Hpricot and Vpim. To install these, open a terminal window and type:

sudo gem install hpricot vpim

Step 3: Permissions

The script needs to have the correct permissions to run. To sort this out, open a terminal window and type:

chmod 774 highrise_to_vcard.rb

Step 4: Setup

The script needs two variables set. To do this, open the script in a text editor (I recommend TextMate) and editor the variables in the setup section of the code. You will need to add your Highrise token and site address.


# --- SETUP --- #
# Enter your Highrise token, found under "My Info"
HIGHRISE_TOKEN = ‘YOUR_TOKEN’

# — END SETUP — #


Step 5: Run

Now run the script from a terminal window and watch as it exports all your contacts:

ruby highrise_to_vcard.rb

Step 6: Import

The script outputs all the vCards into a file called highrise.rb. Simply import this file into Address Book and your contacts will appear with their photographs.

All done

This script works fine for me. I only have about 100 contacts at present but it should work with any number.

Please feel free to tweak, change and update the script. Post a comment below to let me know how you get on or if you need any help.

What’s actually happening?

The script uses the Highrise API to download a list of all your contacts. It then parses the list using Hpricot and builds vCards using Vpim. For more information please see the script itself, it is fairly well commented.