Move phone (device) contacts to google

We, my wife and I, recently upgraded to the Samsung Galaxy S5. She was upgrading from the S4 and noticed that after configuring the device and adding her Google account that nearly all of her contacts had missing phone numbers when we had both expected the Google account sync to have transferred nearly everything over in a transparent manner. It turns out that almost all of the phone numbers on the S4 were being saved locally to the device and not to her associated Google account. You might be able to see this on your phone if you go to a contact and hit the edit icon. Some information will be in the 'Google' tab but the phone number may be in the 'Device' tab.

The Google part of the contact on an S4 (Verizon) showing the email address

The device part of the contact on an S4 (Verizon) showing the phone numbers

This is a real pain because you might have hundreds of contacts with their phone numbers only on your device and you'd like these to automatically transfer to your new device when you add your Google account. There are lots of posts about the same issue on the web but I came across this one that took only seconds to perform and worked very well.

http://forums.androidcentral.com/sprint-epic-4g/123145-move-phone-contacts-google.html says:

"Yeah go to your contacts hit menu then hit the import/export button click export to sd and it will save a copy to your sd card then hit the import/export button again and will ask if u want to import to phone or google and bam they are all on google"

In our case we didn't have an sd card so instead we followed a modified process.

Select "Export to usb device" (oddly enough this saved to an emulated usb device which was actually the S4's internal flash)
Start up the 'My files' application and locate the .vcf file.
Select that file and we were prompted to select which account we wanted to save the contacts to.
Select the google account you'd like to transfer the contacts to.
Wait while it imports hundreds of contacts.
We went to the new device and watched as the missing contact information appeared.

You'll probably end up with some duplicates that you'll have to merge or cleanup but in our case it was a huge time savings vs manually coping each contact.

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