What system do you all use to organise your recipes on your devices. Im really a recipe book girl but have a growing number of screenshots and other digital recipes. I tend to print them if they’re successful but if I forget, i can never find it again. THanks, Janet

I type (or copy and paste) my recipes into a Pages document (or Word, if you use Windows) and save them into various folders in Documents. My folders are presently categorised as General recipes, Asian, Ind*an, Sweet and Low Carb. I can search by ingredient names, or call up a list of recipe names in each folder. I only print when I"m going to cook something, then I keep the hard copies in manilla folders. I try not to print anything twice, and periodically do a purge of the printed copies so they don't get too unmangeable.

The trouble with screenshots and web site links is that you can't search for their contents, only the name you have given them.

actually just email them, and add in keywords and locate by using the search function.

I have been doing the cut and paste too TPANDAV, but wondered if there was a better way. I hadn’t thought about emailing, but wonder if volume would prove problematic. I often email Emma recipes and she’s never able to find them the next time. I’ve been thinking on it for ages, but was just talking to Emma who now lives in China, and she said she only googles recipes now and doesn’t save, but then it can be tricky to find the same one again. Someone has mentioned Paprika or Copy Me That, but I’m unsure how either of them work. Thanks for your thoughts, Janet

I think emails would work as long as you saved them under useful names into searchable folders, but if you wanted to print a recipe you would then have to copy and paste the actual recipe from the email into into a plain document to print, otherwise you'd end up having to print all the email formatting, which would be a waste of ink and paper.

I have a huge number of recipes saved on my hard drive and I can always find what I want by searching for a name, a key ingredient or other key word.

Hmm, I don't know whether it's worth mentioning my method but I really like keeping good recipes and it ensures I can find them easily any time in the future.

I copy paste from the internet. Rarely do I have to type a recipe out from a magazine or newspaper because they're usually all available online these days. You do know, when you copy paste, you get that little box at the end of your paste? It has a file icon and "(Ctrl)" and a little down arrow. If you click on the down arrow and choose "A" - "Keep Text Only", it gets rid of photos, links, etc and just leaves you with the recipe words (text).

I paste into a Word doc I have called "Recipes to Try". I usually print the recipe out - remember I've done the recipe as text only so that simplifies the printing and the cost, plus I change the ink colour to a darkish grey or you can choose draft print. I like printing it out because, as I make the recipe for the first time, I write notes all over it of what I've changed, what needs changing, ingredient amounts if I'm halving the recipe, etc.

Usually the same day as I've made the recipe for the first time I either throw the recipe away or I keep it. If I throw it away, I throw the printed copy away (or cut it into notepaper ) and I move the digital version of it to the front of my Recipes to Try doc where I have a list called "Bad Recipes". The font for Bad Recipes is small and I do other things to reduce the amount of space these recipes take up (e.g. I run the ingredients one after the other in a line rather than a vertical list). I note the date I tried the recipe and why I didn't like it. I like keeping "bad recipes" because a search of them can stop me from making a similar recipe by mistake. It's very searchable.

If I'm keeping the recipe I've just tried, I cut it from Recipes to Try and paste it into another Word doc I have titled "Recipe Book" which is where all good recipes go. Recipe Book has an index at the front and is divided into main sections (e.g. Meals, Soup/Lunch/Veg, Desserts, Cakes & Biscuits, Miscellaneous) and these main sections are divided into further sections (e.g. curries). I tidy the recipe up a bit into a standardised design (large recipe title, info about source, date, and notes/comments, etc) and then I print it out and put it into my recipe folders in the kitchen. These recipe folders match the sections that Recipe Book is divided into.

To some, it might seem a lot of mucking about but it's actually all pretty quick and simple (copy, paste, print...) and it means all my recipes, bad and good, are totally searchable, easy to give to anyone else, and I prefer to work in the kitchen from a hard copy.

I use MS OneNote which is just like a real recipe book, but fully customisable to the way I want it. It has chapters for the various types of recipe: Meat, Vegetable, Desserts, etc and within each chapter I have created an alphabetical index. I just need to run my eye down the index, click on the name of the recipe I want and it opens.

I also have markers called Tags which I can attach. Each is a little icon that is attached to a recipe and when I hover over the icon, it tells me what it means. I also attach it to the name of the recipe in the index. For instance, I have recipes tagged as Slow Cooker, Favourite, Quick, Uncookies, and these tags are fully searchable. The tags are also customisable as to the name I give them and what colour I want the icon to be.

I have made a template page that I use for every recipe so that the 'book' has a uniform look, same fonts, same layout, same page colour background. If I have copied and pasted a recipe from online, I can insert the same picture or go and searcg for a better one online, and I also save the link to the recipe at the end of the text. I can also type the recipes manually if they're not online and I can use my own photos if I want to. I can email the recipes from within the programme and the whole OneNote programme is available to me anywhere online as it's automatically saved in OneDrive.

I tried to attach a picture of one of my recipe pages but I can't get my camera to take pics any less than 3mb and FL won't accept anything bigger than 2mb.

Lorna, you'll have a programme on your computer that you can use to resize any photo. Do you have Paint or Paint 3D for example? This tells you how to do it in Paint [www.howtogeek.com] and Paint 3D is similar.

I copy internet recipes into pages (Mac) and have a folder on my desktop called Recipes. That folder is in a mess and will need organising. I also print out recipes and put them into two Eastlight binders: baking and cooking. In those I have subdivisions like cakes, buiscuits, yeast baking etc etc. They get culled every so often. I really must not print out so many recipes that I will probably never use.

I print most and stick them in a big plastic clearfile, that way I can shuffle through and look, then have the recipe in front of me rather than having to keep opening the screen on a device. In terms of saving recipes, I'm the same as Plates, I just email them to myself with a bunch of keywords for searching. I don't sort them into folders, just search when I'm looking for something.

When doing this, I too delete all the photos and extra rubbish, and it is a rare event a recipe takes more than a single page, even with the email headers. I use gmail and find the headers are minimal.

Clearfile for me too, Jenna. I find no matter whether digital or hard copy, I collect far too many, so if they are in a clearfile the space is limited and so i know it is time for a throw out.

I'll add my Recipe Book folders are A5 ring binders [discountoffice.co.nz] and I insert the recipes into A5 copysafe pockets [discountoffice.co.nz] I like to use A5 because it's an ideal size for one recipe per page. I don't like having two or more recipes per page because it makes it more likely I'll look at the wrong recipe at some point during the making of it.....



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/11/2019 08:19AM by J1.

To be fair, my clear file isn't that organised. It is more of a thick clear envelope that everything gets shoved in. I then shuffle through when I'm looking for something. It's about 4cm thick at the moment, so about time for a clear out for me as well!

J1, I use paint.NET for any alterations needed. Very often, if I use google picture search the photo in the recipe is shown in those previews at just the right size, and any small re-sizing can be done just by using the 'handles' round the photo within OneNote. However, I usually like to put most of the photos into paint.NET and enhance the colouring using the brightness and contrast controls and the hue and saturation. I find the photos from online are generally a bit too dark for my liking.

paint.NET is a free photo-editing programme that rivals the best on the market. It has all sorts of tools and controls to be able to get photos exactly as you want them. I love the cloning tool because it means I can remove unwanted text from a photo.

Ahha! J1, I see now what you're getting at re the photo-editing programmes. Yes, paint.NET does that too, but I hadn't thought about resizing the one I was trying to attach to my earlier post!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/11/2019 10:45PM by Lorna.

Argh, what a problem this is. I'm trying to transit to keeping digital recipes instead of ripping them out of magazines as I already have far more of those than I can deal with. I either cut and paste from the webpage or use the Windows snipping tool to save the recipe as a jpg. The categories I use are Vegetarian, Chicken, Fish, Soups, Salads, Baking, Desserts, plus one with the few red meat recipes I have plus odds and ends like preserving and confectionery Those are the most useful to me as I tend to do my meal planning around one salmon dish and one fish dish a week and the rest mostly vegetarian, and at one end of the year I'm making salads and the other soups, but of course your categories will be different to suit you. I do think it's important to have some, though, otherwise the collection is difficult to navigate.

J1 you legend - I didn't know about that function in paste which keeps just the text. I spend a lot of time mucking around getting rid of things I don't need. That is soooooo much faster thanks.

I usually copy recipes into a word document and then keep them in a folder on my computer. Usually I only use those if someone asks for a copy of a recipe, else I often don't look at that folder. Generally I print them at the same time I create the word doc and put them into a clearlight folder. I think I'm up to about 6 of these and I really must have a clean out. No real method to my madness but a couple of baking folders and everything else in the others.

Thanks cantabcook , it's very handy isn't it.

My Recipe Book's kept pretty up to scratch but a few of years ago I cooked my way through the evening meals section, making sure I still enjoyed all the recipes. If I didn't, they were put into Bad Recipes with a note about why I no longer wanted them.
Since then, each time I cook one of the recipes I note the date on it (e.g. "July 2019" ). Then I can easily see what recipes haven't been made in awhile, I can avoid using a recipe too close to the last time I made it, etc... The dates are surprisingly helpful and it's amazing how time flies!



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/02/2019 12:30PM by J1.

More things I've thought of in my "filing" system. If the recipe gets a massive thumbs up from at least 3 of the family it gets 3 ticks noted on the side. I also do this in my recipe books although some might be horrified at marking actual books...…

In my diary I note what I cooked for dinner each night at the bottom of the page. So when the kids say we havn't had such and such recipe for aaaaggges I can actually check. And when I'm planning the next weeks meals I can easily see what we had recently (because my brain sure would not remember)!