How do I get paper-based recipes into Recipe Tamer?

There's no sugar-coating this: it's a chore getting all your recipes into a new system, and that's especially true for paper-based recipes where you can't just copy/paste and be done with it. Here are a few suggestions:

  • You don't have to do it all at once. If you've got a binder or a recipe box, you can work your way through it, adding recipes to Recipe Tamer as you make them, or in small batches. Focus on your favorites first, and take this opportunity to weed out the ones you never make anymore.
  • Use a desktop scanner or a scanning app. Scanning apps work better than just taking a picture with your phone, because they'll try to adjust the contrast and remove distortion. We've had good results with Adobe Scan and CamScanner, but have no relationship with them.
  • Some software will perform character recognition (OCR) to read the text, and save the results in the PDF. When you open the PDF in a viewer like Adobe Acrobat, you will be able to copy and paste text from the document to Recipe Tamer.
  • If you're using a scanning app or the camera on your phone, use the upload feature or the create by e-mail feature to send the recipe to Recipe Tamer.
  • You don't have to reproduce all the recipe text in Recipe Tamer if you don't want to—you can always cook from the scan or photo.
  • But you may want to at least type in the ingredients, so that you can search for ingredients and generate shopping lists.

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