How to Import Recipes from Photos to Your Phone
Got a stack of handwritten recipe cards from your grandmother? A cookbook you love but never actually cook from because flipping pages while your hands are covered in flour is a nightmare?
Replay Recipes lets you photograph any recipe — handwritten, printed, or from a cookbook — and import it directly into the app. Here's how it works.
How Photo Import Works
- Open the app and tap "Add Recipe"
- Choose "Photo" from the import options
- Take a photo of the recipe (or pick from your gallery)
- AI reads the text — it even handles handwriting
- Review and edit — the parsed recipe appears in the builder, ready to tweak
The AI handles the hard part: identifying ingredients, amounts, units, and instructions from unstructured text. It works with messy handwriting, faded printouts, and cookbook pages.
Tips for Better Results
- Good lighting matters — avoid shadows across the text
- Keep it flat — smooth out wrinkles in recipe cards
- One recipe per photo — don't try to capture a full cookbook page with multiple recipes
- Handwriting clarity — the AI is good, but very cursive writing may need manual corrections
What About Copyright?
Importing a recipe for personal use is fine. If you want to share it publicly through the app's community features, make sure you have the right to do so — add attribution to the original source.
Try It
Download Replay Recipes and import your first recipe in under a minute.