Getting a good read from a photo

How to photograph a cookbook page or a recipe card so the import comes out clean, and what happens when a word cannot be read.

Photo import is coming with the paid tier. It is not available yet. This guide explains how it will work and how to take photos that read well, so your recipe cards are ready when it arrives.

A lot of the recipes worth keeping are not on the web. They are in cookbooks, on index cards in someone's handwriting, and on printouts with notes in the margins. Photo import reads the recipe text out of a picture and gives you the same clean, consistent recipe you get from a link.

Photograph the recipe, not the food

Photo import reads words. A beautiful shot of the finished dish has nothing in it to import. Point the camera at the page or the card that has the ingredients and the steps on it.

Taking a photo that reads well

Flat and square. Lay the book open or the card flat, and hold the phone directly above it, parallel to the page. Shooting at an angle squeezes the far side of the text.
Even light, no glare. Daylight from a window is best. Turn the flash off; on glossy pages and laminated cards it leaves a white patch right over the text.
Fill the frame. Get close enough that the recipe fills most of the picture, with a little margin on every side so no line is cut off.
Hold still and focus. Tap the text on screen to focus, and check the photo before you move on. If you cannot read it on your phone, neither can we.
Flatten the spine. Thick cookbooks curve toward the binding. Press the page down gently at the edges, or photograph one page at a time.

Recipes that span pages

When the ingredients are on one page and the method continues on the next, you can send up to three photos as one recipe. Add them in reading order, and they are read together as a single recipe rather than three fragments.

What files work

JPEG, PNG, HEIC (the iPhone default), and WebP, up to 10 MB each before upload. Photos are turned the right way up and resized automatically, so there is no need to edit them first.

Handwriting and hard-to-read words

Faded ink, cramped handwriting, and stains happen, especially on the cards that matter most. We do not guess at a word we cannot read with confidence; we flag it. If an amount, an ingredient, or an oven temperature is unclear, the recipe arrives with that spot flagged in a "Needs your input" box, so you can check it against the card instead of trusting a confident-looking mistake. Understanding a gap flag explains what those flags mean.

Where the recipe came from

A photographed recipe has no web link, so you can note where it came from instead, such as a cookbook title and page number, or "Grandma's card box". That note stays with the recipe the same way a link does for an imported page.

Your photos stay yours

Photos you upload are stored privately in your account and sent to our AI provider only to read the recipe text. They are never used for anything else and never shown to anyone else.