How to organise recipes that are scattered everywhere
Do not try to gather everything at once. Start an empty collection and add a recipe only at the moment you actually cook it, so the collection fills with things you really make rather than things you once meant to. Give every entry the same three fields — name, ingredients, where it came from — and stop there; a tagging system you invent on day one is a system you abandon by day ten.
1Why the big migration always fails
The instinct is to set aside a Sunday, open every screenshot, and type it all up. Almost nobody finishes, and the ones who do end up with two hundred recipes of which they cook eleven.
The collection is not the goal. Being able to find the thing you want to cook tonight is the goal, and a big collection is actively worse at that than a small one.
2Fill it forwards, not backwards
The rule that works: add a recipe **the evening you cook it**, not before. It takes two minutes, it is already in your hands, and you know it is worth keeping because you just ate it.
After a month you will have somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five entries and they will be, almost exactly, the food you actually eat. That is a finished collection. It just did not feel like a project.
3Three fields, and no more
Name. Ingredients. Where it came from.
That is enough to cook from and enough to find. Every extra field — cuisine, difficulty, season, star rating, tags — is a small decision you now have to make every single time you add something, and those decisions are what kill collections. If you find yourself designing a taxonomy, you have stopped organising recipes and started building a database.
4Screenshots are the hard case, and the answer is to let most of them go
A screenshot is unsearchable. There is no getting round that without retyping it.
So triage rather than convert: scroll the album once, and for anything you have genuinely cooked, retype the ingredients — it is two minutes. Everything else stays a screenshot, and that is fine. A photo you never cooked from is not a recipe, it is a bookmark of a feeling.
5Keep the link, always
Whatever you use, store where the recipe came from. Half the value of a saved recipe is the method, and the method usually lives on the page.
This is also why an app that imports from a link is worth more than one you type into: you paste the URL, the ingredients arrive as editable lines, and you correct anything the page got wrong before it saves. In Farro that is Recipes, Add, paste a link — and what it read is shown to you first, because a wrong quantity is worse than no quantity.
Questions people ask next
What is the best way to store recipes digitally?
Any app that keeps the ingredients as editable text and the source link. Avoid anything that only stores an image, because you cannot search a photograph or build a shopping list from it.
Should I organise recipes by cuisine or by meal?
Neither, at first. Under about thirty recipes any list is scannable, and a category system invented early is a decision tax on every future addition. Add structure when the list actually gets hard to scan.
How do I get recipes off screenshots?
Retype the ingredients for the ones you have actually cooked and let the rest go. There is no reliable shortcut, and the triage is more valuable than the conversion.
Can I import recipes from a website?
Often, yes. Most recipe sites publish structured data for search engines, and an app that reads it can pull in the title, servings and ingredient lines from a pasted link. Sites that publish none cannot be imported by anyone.