Turn a photo of a recipe into text
Photograph a recipe book page, a handwritten card or a screenshot, and I will type the whole thing out for you.
What this is good at
| Source | How well it works | What to watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Printed recipe book page | Very well | Curved pages and glare. Shoot it flat if you can |
| Recipe card, printed | Very well | Nothing much. This is the easy case |
| Handwritten card | Well, usually | Unusual handwriting and faded ink. It flags uncertain words |
| Phone screenshot | Very well | Crop out the browser chrome and the adverts first |
| Photo of a screen | Reasonably | Screen reflections and moire patterns hurt accuracy |
| A social media post | Reasonably | Caption text is often partial. It extracts what is there |
How to photograph a recipe properly
- Shoot straight down, not at an angle. Perspective skew is the main cause of misread numbers.
- Get the whole recipe in one frame if you can, or one clear photo per section rather than a blurry photo of everything.Find Recipes
- Avoid glare. Move so the light is coming from the side rather than reflecting off the page.
- For handwritten cards, shoot on a plain background so the edges are clear.
- For screenshots, crop to the recipe. The tool will otherwise transcribe the cookie banner and the adverts too.
- Check the transcription against the original before you cook. It is a reading, not a guarantee.
The mistakes I made transcribing by hand
When I was typing these out myself I got quantities wrong constantly. Half a teaspoon became half a cup. Two hundred degrees became two hundred and twenty. Those are the errors that ruin a bake, and they are exactly the errors that a photo transcription can also make.
So the rule I follow now: always check the quantities and the oven temperature against the original before cooking. Everything else is forgiving. Those two are not.
What to do with the text once you have it
Copy it and paste it wherever you keep recipes. If you keep them in a notes app, it works fine. If you want them in the app, you can save them as a user recipe and they will be there next time.
The real win is searchability. A photograph of a recipe card is invisible to search. A typed recipe is findable, which means the card that has been sitting in a box for twenty years actually gets used.
What it will not do
It will not improve a bad photo. If the handwriting is genuinely illegible, the transcription will be too, and the honest result is that it says so rather than guessing.
It will not fill in a missing part of a recipe. If the card is torn or the page is cut off, it transcribes what is visible and tells you what is missing, rather than inventing a plausible ending.
My grandmother recipe cards are the reason I built this. There are about forty of them, all in her handwriting, and for years the only way to use one was to photograph it on my phone and squint at the screen in the kitchen with flour on my hands.
The other half of the problem is screenshots. I have a camera roll with a few hundred saved recipe screenshots in it, and finding the one I want means scrolling through photos of my dog for five minutes.
Both problems are the same problem: the recipe exists as pixels and I need it as text.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Upload a photo of a printed page, a handwritten card or a screenshot, and the tool reads it and returns the title, ingredients and method as typed text you can copy.