Contact birthdays not showing in calendar iPhone

Do you see someones birthday you want to remove from your iPhone Calendar? Is your iPhone Calendar full of birthdays that you don’t care about or don’t care to see? Want to delete these birthdays from your iPhone or iPad Calendar and are perplexed that there’s no obvious way to do so? Are you wondering why you can’t delete birthdays from the Calendar app? Fear not, we will walk you through how to clean up your calendar and get rid of birthdays you do not want to see on your iPhone or iPad, and changes made there will also impact the Mac.

The way Calendar app handles birthdays on iPhone, iPad, and Mac for that matter, is a little curious. Birthdays are added to the Calendar through the Contacts app. Yes you read that correctly, the Contacts app controls what birthdays show up in the Calendar on iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Thus, if you want to remove a birthday from the Calendar app, you have to go to Contacts, and edit the contact to remove the birthday. This is because the Calendar app only gives you the option to either show all birthdays or none of them, and any birthday attached to a contact shows up in Calendar. Yes that means if some coworker or random person shared a contact card with you and they attached a birthday, you’ll get alerts and notifications that their birthday is arriving and here – even if you couldn’t care any less. Fun right? Ok let’s get rid of this nuisance.

How to Delete Birthdays from Calendar on iPhone & iPad

Wondering how you can remove a birthday from Calendar? Curious why you can’t delete birthday events from your calendar? Here’s how to do this:

1. Open the Contacts app on the iPhone or iPad (yes seriously, open Contacts to get rid of birthdays in Calendars)
2. Locate the name of the contact of the birthday showing up in your Calendar and tap on them
3. Tap on “Edit”
4. Scroll down and locate ‘birthday’ and tap the red (-) minus button to delete their birthday from the contact, confirm by tapping Delete


5. Repeat with other contacts birthdays you want to remove from the Calendar
6. Return to Calendar app to find their birthdays no longer clogging up your calendar

Your Calendar app is now free from the unwanted birthdays.

There is currently no way to to keep birthdays in a contacts card and not show their particular birthday in the Calendar app.

How to Hide All Birthdays from Calendar on iPhone, iPad

Another option is to hide all birthdays from the Calendars app. Again, you can not hide specific birthdays, it’s all or nothing.

1. Open the Calendar app
2. Tap on “Calendars”
3. Scroll down and uncheck the box next to “Birthdays” to hide all birthdays from Calendars

This method does not remove the birthdays, it just hides them all. Any birthday stored in a contact card will continue to be there, ready to see again if you re-enable the Birthdays Calendar.

That you can only see all birthdays or none is kind of like how you can hide all Holidays from Calendars on the iPhone or iPad but not only some of them that you don’t celebrate or care to see.

It’s unclear why Calendars is so restrictive and all-or-nothing, but that’s what we have to work with on iPhone and iPad (and again, Mac) for the time being.

Perhaps a future version of Calendars will allow hiding specific birthdays (and holidays) from the Calendar app without removing them from the Contacts app, but for now you’ll have to follow the two options detailed above.

Let us know your thoughts and experiences with removing or hiding birthdays from the Calendar on your iPhone or iPad in the comments below.

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macOS Calendar, Reminders, and BusyCal can each display alarms for your Events and To Dos. You should disable the alerts for macOS Calendar and Reminders to prevent receiving two alarms for every event — one displayed by macOS Calendar or Reminders and another displayed by BusyCal.

If you have BusyContacts installed, BusyCal will read in birthdays from BusyContacts. So you will need to launch BusyContacts while BusyCal is running to read in any recently updated Birthdays. If you have BusyContacts installed but are not using it or it is expired, you will need to drag the BusyContacts app to the trash. Then BusyCal will pull birthdays from Apple Contacts instead.

If that doesn't solve it, please toggle these checkbox settings in BusyCal Preferences to see if that solves it:

• BusyCal > Preferences > General > Show Birthdays calendar
• BusyCal > Preferences > General > Show Anniversaries calendar

If that doesn't work, then it might be due to the fact that BusyCal requires access to Contacts for displaying the Birthdays calendar and processing meeting invitations. The first time you launch BusyCal you should be presented with a dialog asking if you want to grant BusyCal permission to access your contacts. Perhaps you clicked Don't Allow?

To fix this, open System Preferences > Security & Privacy, select Contacts in the left sidebar, then check BusyCal.app.

BusyContacts has a Show Dates in Calendar feature for controlling which birthdays to display so that your calendar is not overwhelmed with unwanted birthdays from Facebook or LinkedIn. In BusyContacts, go to BusyContacts > Preferences > Info Panel, click on the Show Field popup and make sure Show Dates in Calendar is checked.

Then, in BusyContacts select the contact who's birthday or anniversary you want to show in BusyCal, go into Edit mode and make sure the Show dates checkbox is checked for that card. Once it's checked, the birthday and/or anniversary for that card will show up in BusyCal.

You can learn more here:

https://support.busymac.com/help/47353-birthdays-and-anniversaries#show-dates

You should be able to solve this birthday duplication in one of these ways:

A) You may have some corrupted cached Birthday data. Uncheck the Show Birthdays calendar preference in BusyCal > Preferences > General, and quit BusyCal. Then launch BusyCal and re-enable the Birthdays calendar in BusyCal > Preferences > General. Hopefully that will clear it up.

If that doesn't work, please try this:

B) You may have duplicate contacts in macOS Contacts. This might happen if you have contacts (with birthdays) stored both locally On My Mac, as well as on iCloud.

The duplicate may be hidden in macOS Contacts. You can verify that a contact is duplicated by an attribute in the Contact Card called "cards" in gray. If this entry lists "On My Mac" and "iCloud", then that contact is on both lists.

You'll need to delete the duplicate local contacts that are stored On My Mac, so you only have one of each contact stored on iCloud. In macOS Contacts, click on the "All on My Mac" header in the Contacts sidebar, then delete any contacts under that list that are also listed under All iCloud.

Anniversary. Birthday not syncing. Birthdates not syncing. Anniversaries not shown. Anniversaries not loading. No Anniversary data. No Birth day syncing.

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