How to add birthdays to Apple calendar without contacts

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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