Recipe Magpie: taggable, sortable, text AND photos

September 22, 2020 12:48 PM

I have some unexpected free time on my hands (thanks Covid!) and thought I might use it to actually clean up my disaster of recipe storage. I'm looking for a service that can convert photos to legible text; save information from a website; display that info as a recipe- simple white background black text at a legible size. I'd like to be able to add notes easily, and I'd like to be able to organize with tags. In a perfect world it would be able to batch import, and copy tags/organization. What have you tried?

I am currently keeping recipes in:
1) a semi-organized, manageable box of index cards, photocopies, torn-from-magazine pages;
2) a well curated collection of cookbooks currently in storage and not accessible;
3) A few hundred disorganized photos snapped of other people's cookbooks or magazines or menu descriptions of delicious foods;
4) several hundred well tagged recipes on pinboard.in
1 and 2 are ok for the moment, but I'd like to consolidate 3 and 4 into something functional.

I have tried (and am open to trying again):
Paprika: does not import bookmarks in batches, doesn't import photos as recipes. I don't care about creating shopping lists.
Evernote: No batch importing, I strongly dislike the display format.
Pinboard: just bookmarks so at the mercy of each website's formatting; older websites sometimes disappear, doesn't work with photos.
Keeping a hard copy: I miss being able to categorize things in multiple ways (pie AND savory)
Suggestions?

posted by aint broke to Home & Garden (5 answers total)

Best answer: This is just for online recipes - I've found Copy Me That to be invaluable for collecting recipes from web pages. You can manually enter a link, or add a browser extension that you just click when you're on a web page with a recipe. It automatically strips out all of the introductory notes and cruft and produces a page with just the recipe (skipping the thirteen paragraphs of chatter about how little Braden asked for Mom to make this for the school bake sale or whatever), and you have the chance to review it and confirm it all looks right. That saves to your database on the "Copy Me That" site, and you can tag the recipes with as many tags as you like, search within your database, and even edit the recipes a bit (I was mentally cutting some of my recipes in half or in thirds all the time, and finally just went in and edited the ingredient quantities and re-saved and that worked just fine).
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:55 PM on September 22, 2020 [3 favorites]

Of all the services I've used, I like PepperPlate the best, but they do not do the photo import thing. You can "manually" add as much as you want, but there is no way to just attach a photo and call it a recipe, sadly. You might look at it anyway, as the categorization is pretty robust, and they directly support recipe import from a bunch of sites already.
posted by Medieval Maven at 1:34 PM on September 22, 2020

I'm using Recipe Keeper on my iPad, which ticks most of your boxes I believe.
posted by knile at 8:07 PM on September 22, 2020

Google Documents has decent OCR if you upload as a black and white pdf.
posted by soelo at 8:56 PM on September 22, 2020

This extracts text from an image, creating a Google doc with both the original image and the extracted text. No batch process. It's one at a time, then copy and paste the text to where you want it. It assumes you have a google account.

1. Open the website drive.google.com.
2. Upload the image file to Google Drive. Drag and drop is the easiest way.
3. Right-click on your file, and then click "Open With" > "Google Docs".
4. Google Image Text Reader will convert the file to Google Docs.
5. Open the doc.
posted by Homer42 at 7:42 AM on September 23, 2020