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Importing Recipes

Import a recipe photo with OCR

Photograph or upload recipe pages, select readable regions, and review OCR text.

Photo OCR is useful for recipe cards, cookbooks, clippings, and magazines when no selectable text is available.

Prepare the image

  • Light the page evenly and avoid shadows or glare.
  • Hold the camera parallel to the page.
  • Move close enough that letters occupy useful pixels without cutting off the page.
  • For a multi-column page, several closer photographs often outperform one distant full-page image.

Scan the pages

  1. Open Import and select Photos.
  2. Choose Add saved photos or Use camera.
  3. Confirm that each capture appears in the OCR queue, then select Review queue.
  4. Rotate pages until the text is upright.
  5. Draw regions around recipe content and resize or move them as needed.
  6. Reorder regions when their reading order differs from their position on the page.
  7. Select Scan queued page or Scan pages.
  8. Correct the extracted text before converting it to a draft.