Get Organized: How to Digitize Your Recipes (2024)

In this Get Organized article series, I've written before about going and even , like homeownership documents and medical papers, but I have yet to tackle anything in the kitchen. So that's the project at hand: digitizing a recipe collection.

A lot people keep their recipes everywhere, —strewn among old-fashioned recipe card catalogs, tattered magazines, coffee-stained cookbooks, browser bookmarks, and three different email accounts—without any centralization or sense of organization. Here, I'll show you how to take all these bits and pieces and move them to one single place where you'll always be able to find what you need.

How to Use Evernote to Digitize a Recipe Collection
After trying out a few different solutions, my favorite tool for centralizing everything is .

Evernote is a freemium note-taking and note-syncing application that you can use on a Windows PC, Mac, tablet, smartphone, or any device with a Web browser. In other words, you can store files, like typed recipes and snapshots of recipes from magazines, and then tag each one however you want. Everything you put into Evernote is searchable, even the type on PDFs.

Storage limits. While Evernote is extremely open and flexible, new users who are thinking about tackling a recipe collection should know that a free account has monthly upload limit allowance of only 60MB. That means if you start uploading a bunch of recipe PDFs to Evernote, you'll hit your quota very quickly, although the upload counter will reset after one month, so you can input more data then. A paid or Premium Evernote account (from $5 per month) extends your monthly upload limit to 1GB, which will help you upload a lot of content in one shot.

Here's an image of my Evernote screen. I'll zoom in on a few areas to talk about them in more detail.

Stacks and notebooks. Notice on the left side I have a group of files (or "stack") for "FOOD" with subsections (Evernote calls these notebooks) for "Food and Drink Photos," which mostly contains pictures wine bottles and tasting notes, "Recipes: Savory," and "Recipes: Sweet and Baking."

You'll also notice in the image I'm currently on a section called "_INBOX," which is my default location for all new notes. Any time I upload a new file to Evernote, it goes into the inbox until I have time to make sure it is properly named and tagged.

Currently, the inbox has several snapshots of handwritten recipes that I took using my iPhone. In order to burn through a bunch of them in one sitting, I didn't bother at the time to name, tag, and sort them. But that's okay because they're in the inbox, so I'll remember to do it later.

When I'm ready, I can edit the note to write the name of the recipe, add tags (baking, sweet, breakfast), and move it into the appropriate notebook.

Tags and keywords. To find a recipe, I can click on a notebook and browse what I have, or I can search for a specific tag or keyword. For example, I can navigate to the Recipes: Savory notebook and pull up all the files with the tag "vegetarian" or "chicken" or "weeknight meal." You get to decide which tags to use, and you can change them any time.

I recommend keeping your tags to only a few dozen. If your tags are too specific, they start to act more like keywords, and you can already search by keyword. Evernote even searches hand-written text in images and typed text in PDFs. So if you search for "sticky buns," the recipe shown above will appear.

Editing. One of the biggest advantages of using Evernote is that you can add more detail to your notes at any time. When you make a recipe, you can upload and attach an image to the existing note. If you want to edit a file or make additional notes about cooking times or adjustments, you can do that, too.

Sharing. You can share individual notes as well as entire notebooks in Evernote, which makes it really easy for friends and family to access your recipe collections.

Emails. We all have a smattering of recipes saved across multiple email accounts. Another bonus of using Evernote: Each Evernote user gets an @evernote.com email address, and anything you send to that address goes directly into your default notebook as a new note. Simply forward your recipes to the Evernote address and you can tag, sort, and edit them later.

Bookmarks. One element of Evernote you should really learn to love is Web Clipper, which gives you a two-click solution for moving recipes from Web pages into your Evernote account.

The Evernote Web Clipper is a free plug-in you can install on your browser. Once it's in place, just go to the Web page you want—probably from your list of bookmarked recipes—and click the Web Clipper icon. You can save the whole page, or just highlighted parts, and with many recipes, Evernote will automatically highlight just the title, ingredients list, and instructions, leaving out advertisem*nts or photos that might take up too much space.

A Second Solution: NeatDesk
If you've read the Get Organized column before, you'll know I'm a big fan of Evernote. I'm forever amazed at what it can do. But that doesn't mean I don't try other solutions, too. For this recipe collection project, I wanted to give a desktop scanner a go. So I hooked up and brought to the office a folder full of recipes.

Scanning. Some recipes were hand-written on index cards or scraps of paper, and some were torn out of magazines, and most were pretty scrappy. I was impressed that NeatDesk scanned them all without ever jamming once. Each recipe just flew through the scanner and imported to the NeatDesk software program. I whizzed through about 40 recipes in 15 minutes.

Neat's line of products are really designed more for business use, so it's set up to recognize receipts and tax documents. It's not intended for recipes, and I wouldn't recommend anyone spend $400 just to scan some recipe cards, but if you already have NeatDesk or were considering buying it for a small business, you can leverage it for recipes; it'll be a pseudo-hack job.

All the scanned recipes automatically sorted into a folder I set up called Baking, nested within another folder for Recipes. I waited until I got through the stack to trouble shoot the few recipes that were mistakenly categorized as receipts (although I later learned that I could have set the default item type to "document" and not had this problem at all).

Folders and organization. The ability to organize into folders and subfolders with NeatDesk is similar to Evernote. You have good control.

Editing. Basic editing tools are included for fixing up the scanned items, which is something you don't see in Evernote. I could rotate files that I had to scan sideways due to the page size, as well as brighten the images and increase or decrease the contrast.

For the text, however, you can only add notes to a notes field. You can't actually type a new document in Neat the way you can with Evernote.

Images. If you use Neat, you can install the mobile app for and take photos of cookbook pages that you want to upload, so you don't have to rip them out of the book and scan them.

Email. Just as with Evernote, all NeatDesk users get a @neatcloud.com address, and anything sent there automatically imports into your default folder.

Sharing? As I mentioned, using the Neat software to store your recipes is a bit of a hack job, so sharing features aren't included. You could export batches of files and email them to friends, but you won't find tools for collaborating and sharing natively.

Other Places to Keep Recipes

Pinterest. I've tried using Pinterest for saving recipes, but it doesn't suit my personality (though I adore Pinterest for home décor, which I'll cover in a future article).

If you're visually oriented and enjoy sharing recipes with friends, I highly recommend creating a free Pinterest account and making a few boards for recipes. Pinterest is kind of like a virtual cork board or scrap book. You can't tag or sort your recipes, which feels too disorganized for me, but you can group recipes onto boards that are as vague ("Recipes") or as specific ("Asian lunch ideas")_as you want them to be. Anything you pin to a board is stuck in place, meaning you can't shuffle the order of pins or even so much as alphabetize.

You could always use Pinterest for those times when you want casual, visual browsing, and then push to Evernote any recipe that you want to keep in a more organized fashion.

Cooking websites. Plenty of cooking and food websites let you create an account to save recipes. That's fine, but you're often limited to what's in their network. If you do use an account on a cooking site to bookmark recipes, remember you can always clip them to Evernote with the Web Clipper.

Recipe apps. I've tried a number of special apps for saving recipes and have run into the same problems that I found in cooking websites. Special features you often will find in these apps and sites that you can't get from Evernote include the ability to generate a shopping list based on recipes you tick, as well as the ability to add recipes to a meal-planning calendar. If those two specific features float your boat, try .

Get Organized and Get Cooking
Organizing your recipes could be a very large project, depending on the number of recipes you have to digitize as well as their format. The payoff, though, isn't just improved organization for your own use. A well-organized digital recipe collection makes it easier to share them … or lock them up using a password if you'd rather take those secret family recipes to the grave.