Multi-login cloud-based recipe storage
January 26, 2024 7:19 AM   Subscribe

My partner and I are looking for a cloud-based solution to manage our ever-growing recipe collection. It does not have to be designed specifically for recipes, but it does need to meet some recipe-related criteria. Snowflakes inside. Do you have our ideal solution?

My partner and I have been using Google Keep for several months to store our recipes from diverse sources, after having one too many recipe webpages vanish on us. The one benefit is that it is available on all of our devices. But it has a lot of limitations - the most frustrating of which is that our tags (like "quick," "breakfast" and so on) don't carry over to each other. It also doesn't allow formatting like "bold," which is annoying from a legibility point of view.

We are looking for something to replace it. Criteria are:
- platform-agnostic (we are a Mac/PC/Android household)
- searchable
- will allow us to collaboratively tag and categorize the recipes
- ideally will automagically allow us to share everything with a certain tag with each other so we don't have to type in each other's bloody email addresses every time
- ideally has basic formatting capabilities so we can bold words like "Ingredients" and "Directions."

If it had OCR scanning that would be particularly great as I am often inputting recipes from magazines.

I know there is someone here who has figured this out - I can't wait to see your recommendations!
posted by rednikki to Food & Drink (18 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: Paprika supports Mac/iOS/PC/Android and has cloud sync built in. I've used it on iOS and Mac for years and I'm really happy with it. It does not have official tagging, but you can create customized categories.

The downside is that you will have to pay per platform, but it is a one-time fee.
posted by theBigRedKittyPurrs at 7:39 AM on January 26, 2024 [12 favorites]


Best answer: CopyMeThat has most of those bases covered; the only one I'm not sure of is how its tag sharing works. Free and premium tiers, with the best recipe clipper I've seen.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 7:46 AM on January 26, 2024


Best answer: Can you explain more about the sharing part? Do you each want to have your own set and only share some with the other person?

Paprika is great for most everything here if you can just keep all recipes in one account and not separate “yours, mine, and ours”. You can certainly tag recipes with your name, for example, but there is no hiding recipes from the other user. It has bolding, but you don’t need to label ingredients vs directions because that is built in as two different fields.

OCR is also not part of it, but I solve that by searching the recipe name and the magazine name together. Most of the time it pulls up the exact webpage and you can import it with a single button click. Paprika is better at imports than most other recipe apps that I’ve tried.
posted by soelo at 7:46 AM on January 26, 2024 [1 favorite]


You can do all of this in Dropbox, you'd just have to accept files as the unit of recipe storage (e.g. a PDF of a printable recipe from a website, a .doc you make yourself of a personal recipe with formatting, etc).
posted by telegraph at 7:51 AM on January 26, 2024


Best answer: Seconding CopyMeThat. The only caveat is that you have to flag each recipe as being "shareable" as you add it.

However, I have an easier idea for CopyMeThat - just get one account, and then you both have the password and you can both access it. That way you don't have to worry about making things shareable. Every other thing you're looking for is on the platform - it lets you tag and add categories for recipes, you can edit them after the fact, and it's searchable. It also is available on the web AND as a phone app, so you could even have one of you adding a recipe at the computer while the other is in the kitchen with their phone, and they pull it up on their phone once it's in there and can start cooking.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:51 AM on January 26, 2024 [1 favorite]


Best answer: We use Paprika too. We have a single shared login to our Paprika account, but it syncs more or less* automatically between devices. The software has been around for a while, which is reassuring—I've had a couple of online recipe services vanish too.

Paprika has hierarchical categorization, which can be a little confusing; for example, I've set up a Meal category with Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner subcategories. But you can categorize a recipe as just "Meal," which isn't particularly helpful.

* On the Mac, at least, if you use the Share action to add a recipe you find online to Paprika, you need to launch the Mac app before it syncs to the cloud.
posted by adamrice at 7:59 AM on January 26, 2024


Best answer: Paprika does have OCR, at least on my iPhone version of the app—I don’t know if it’s an iOS thing or a Paprika thing—but I actually find it is faster and less prone to errors to dictate the recipe into it.

My only real complaint about Paprika is that I can’t search the ingredients/directions on my phone, just the title. That’s led me to make an “Ingredients” category with sub-categories for beans, potatoes, etc. for items we tend to have a lot of in the pantry that aren’t always in the title. (Can I search ingredients on the desktop app? I don’t know and I’m not near my desk at the moment to try.)
posted by telophase at 8:19 AM on January 26, 2024


If the distinction matters to you, Paprika does not have multilogin - their official recommendation is to share login info. For most people I don't think that's an important distinction, but I wanted to at least call it out. Otherwise, it does fulfill your requests.
posted by Tomorrowful at 8:23 AM on January 26, 2024


I use evernote for this, but my tech family sources tell me evernote is in trouble financially and they use notion. It works great for recipes and you can share it with other people who have an evernote account.
posted by bluesky43 at 9:15 AM on January 26, 2024


My only real complaint about Paprika is that I can’t search the ingredients/directions on my phone, just the title.

I have no problem searching “potato” and getting recipes that have it as an ingredient but not in the title. I am using the iOS app. I can also search “potatoes” and get a different set of results. Are searching the plural or singular version of a word and just not getting the other version?


As far as tagging versus categories, you can add multiple categories to any recipe, so they function like tags.
posted by soelo at 9:38 AM on January 26, 2024


I asked a related question last year that might be helpful. We ended up using a shared Evernote login and are happy with it.
posted by matildatakesovertheworld at 9:49 AM on January 26, 2024


This may or may not be a thing for you, unless you're technically savvy, but if you can do self-hosting then Mealie has all the things you're looking for. I have been running a local server for a few months now and find it very nice. I
posted by patternocker at 10:11 AM on January 26, 2024 [1 favorite]


I set up my own WordPress blog site for this over a decade ago, and still regularly add to it with my favourite recipes as I modify or develop them.

I first set it up as a website, because I was going to be travelling, and didn't want to carry my favourite recipe books and accumulated recipe notes with me in a backpack, but figured I would have easy internet access in most places. (I have two large boxes of recipe books, and often just have a few regularly used recipes from each).

I intentionally don't embed ads in the website (I really hate the overwhelming popups and moving inline ads on most recipe websites), nor do I add loads of pre-amble text.
Just 'serves 2, ingredients ... Method...' and then tags like 'lunch'.
Written primarily for my own reference, with all the information I'll need to make it again.
And if other people regularly use it too (as I'm told they do) then that's good by me.

The design is simply whatever the latest default Wordpress new theme is each year. And there's a free to install search cell at the top of every page (for a few years the default theme didn't have it, so I just had to add it as a widget)

And then there are easy tags and categories to add to each post, that can be sorted by or searched by.
I also take a final photo which is my 'featured image' so it's more like an old style colour recipe book.
If there's a particularly weird mid-stage step I may take a photo (or even video) of that too, and include that on the recipe post page. But I generally try to avoid it, and just keep it as simple plain text.

You can easily have multiple authors to add new recipes, catagorise, add tags, etc. And both can be logged in at the same time (and it warns you when both authors are trying to edit the same page at once).

If you're taking photos of your favourite recipe page from your books, you can simply upload that as an image, and then convert it to text as time goes on should you wish.
Although with OCR built into some phone photo apps now, you could probably just copy and paste the text directly as plain text into the post page.

Similarly if you have favourite recipes elsewhere on the web, you can make a bookmark page so it doesn't matter what device you're using and if your bookmarks have copied across between devices.
For me, whenever I find a good recipe elsewhere, I'm normally modifying a big part of it for my own locally available food and my own preferences, so I'm generally just hosting the whole receipe on my own site. If a new recipe is largely based on another elsewhere, I add a link to that original recipe. Although as I've discovered, years on many of those original recipes have vanished from those sites, so I'm glad I copied across the key info when I did.

Hosting your own Wordpress site does require buying and renewing a domain name, and hosting that domain each year. But for me in the scheme of things, it's well worth it for me (annual cost for both is about as much as a good takeaway meal for two where I am).
I don't use Wix nor Squarespace, as the options like search were always an extra premium cost subscription. So self-hosted WordPress is cheaper for me.

Also self-hosting means I'm not stuck using a sub-domain of someone else that may suddenly get removed. Plus I can make off-line backups of the whole site as often as I want.

It also means when I've made something for someone and they'd like the recipe, it's really easy to share that recipe with them with a link.

Then as a bonus I don't have to wade through crappy LLM generated SEO optimised search results on the main web, just to get access to a version of a recipe I remember vaguely from years ago. Just keep a link to my recipe blog website on my phone / tablet / laptop browser, or type the URL in manually wherever I am.

I'm pretty sure that ticks all your boxes?
posted by many-things at 11:30 AM on January 26, 2024


Best answer: 3rd-ing Copymethat! i've used the free tier for years now and am super happy. you can definitely do everything you require, but I agree with the "keep it to 1 login" idea.
posted by alchemist at 11:49 AM on January 26, 2024


Best answer: I came to second Paprika! (With the single-login but user tags/folders to sort as you see fit caveat). I've got it across MacOS, Windows, iPhone and iPad.
posted by tiamat at 1:59 PM on January 26, 2024


In the past, I used a free wordpress.com blog for this. Then I used the premium version of pocket, but gave up on it. I actually still do the whole save to pocket thing as a backup. Now I use Copy Me This (free tier) and I like it.
posted by kathrynm at 4:09 PM on January 26, 2024


I access my online-only recipes almost exclusively from my phone and settled on AnyList for this. My partner and I were already using it for shared list-making, and the recipe section was a surprising bonus that works on Android, iOS, and web browsers.

Possible issues based on your ask: the web import on iOS is ~85% successful for me, you can assign an item to multiple collections but there’s not really a separate tagging function, no camera or picture-based import (but you can copy/paste a list of ingredients or steps from another tool).
posted by gathfach at 9:35 AM on January 27, 2024


Best answer: My only real complaint about Paprika is that I can’t search the ingredients/directions on my phone, just the title.

I thought that, too, but then I found the setting you can update that allows you to include ingredient and sources when searching.

I love Paprika and basically all my friends and family use it now. It should meet your requirements, and while it’s not on your list, my favorite feature is being able to easily scale a recipe if I want to make more or fewer servings.
posted by thejanna at 4:43 AM on January 28, 2024


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