How to turn a cookbook page or a recipe website into a saved recipe

Some of the best recipes you own aren’t on TikTok. They are in a splattered paperback from 2009, on a card in your grandmother’s handwriting, or on a food blog under 1,400 words about someone’s trip to Tuscany.

This guide covers getting both kinds, paper and web, into a recipe you can cook from. We’ll show the Dishpin way, because it’s ours, but also the free tools already on your iPhone and when they are the better choice.

From a cookbook page

The free way: Notes or Photos

Your iPhone can already do a lot here:

• Notes has a document scanner. In a note, tap the attachment button, then Scan Documents. It straightens the page and drops it into the note. Great for keeping the page exactly as printed, notes in the margins and all.
• Live Text lets you select the text in any photo, copy it, and paste it somewhere else. Handy for grabbing just the ingredient list.

What you get is a picture of a recipe, or a block of text. That’s fine for a recipe you’ll read once. It gets tiresome when you’re scrolling a photo with a buttery thumb looking for step 4.

The Dishpin way: photo import

Dishpin reads the photo and turns it into a structured recipe: the ingredient list becomes a checklist, the method becomes separate steps, and any step with a duration gets a timer.

1. In Dishpin, go to Recipes and tap + Import.
2. Tap Scan a page to take a photo with the camera, or Choose photos to pick from your library.
3. Add up to three photos of one recipe, in order. That covers the common case of a recipe that runs over a page turn: photo one is the ingredients, photo two the method.
4. Send it. The recipe lands in your Recipe box, credited as From your photos.

You can also do this from the Photos app: select up to three photos, tap Share, then Dishpin.

One thing we did on purpose: when Dishpin can’t read an amount clearly, it leaves it empty instead of guessing. A blank is annoying. A confidently wrong “2 cups salt” is worse. So glance over the ingredients before you cook a photo import, especially the first time.

How to take a photo Dishpin can read

These help any text recognition, not just ours:

• Flatten the book. Curved pages near the spine are the most common cause of misread lines. Press the book open with a can or a cutting board.
• Use daylight, and kill the glare. Glossy cookbook paper reflects overhead lights. Tilt the book slightly toward a window.
• Fill the frame with the recipe. One recipe per import. If the page has two recipes, crop or frame just yours.
• Shoot straight on. A phone held parallel to the page beats an angled shot every time.
• Handwriting: neat cards usually come through. Faded pencil and very loose cursive are a coin toss for any reader, human or machine. Retake the photo in better light before giving up.

Your photo imports stay yours. Dishpin’s Explore section only recommends recipes from public creator posts that our team has reviewed; nothing you photograph is ever shown to other cooks.

From a recipe website

The free way: bookmarks, Reading List and print

Safari bookmarks and Reading List are free and sync everywhere. Many recipe sites also have a Print or Jump to recipe button that strips the life story and gives you a clean card, which you can save as a PDF.

The catch: links rot. Sites redesign, recipes move behind paywalls, blogs disappear. A bookmark is a pointer, not a copy, and a saved PDF is a copy you can’t do much with.

The Dishpin way: share the page

1. On the recipe page in Safari, tap Share, then Dishpin. (Or copy the address, tap + Import in Dishpin and paste it.)
2. That’s it. The recipe comes back with its ingredients, steps and timers, credited to the site with a link to the original page.

Sites with a proper recipe card (the kind with a Jump to recipe button) come through exactly as the author wrote them. Other pages work too, as long as the recipe is written on the page.

When a website won’t import

A few things get in the way:

• Paywalls and sign-in walls. If you need an account to see the recipe, so would Dishpin. Copy the recipe text while you are signed in and paste it into + Import instead.
• PDFs and other files. Dishpin imports web pages, not files. Open the PDF, select the text, and paste it.
• Pages that are mostly something else. A forum thread or a newsletter with a recipe buried halfway down can confuse any reader. Pasting just the recipe works better.

Pasting is the universal fallback: Dishpin turns pasted ingredients and steps into a structured recipe, so anything you can copy, you can import.

Saving the same page twice

Dishpin recognises a page you’ve already saved, even if the link looks a little different. You’ll see Already in your Recipe box, and it won’t use up an import.

Free imports, and what’s in Plus

Every import counts the same, whether it’s a photo, a web page, pasted text or a video:

• 5 free imports every 30 days. Each one comes back 30 days after you use it, and failed or duplicate imports never count.
• Logging a meal you cooked from a saved recipe earns an extra import, up to three a week.
• Unlimited imports are part of Dishpin Plus Plus.

Once a recipe is saved, reading it, ticking off ingredients and scaling servings are free. Guided cooking mode, one step per screen with timers Plus, nutrition facts Plus and switching between US and metric amounts Plus are part of Plus.

A note on credit

A cookbook is someone’s years of work, and a recipe blog pays its bills with your visits. Save recipes for your own kitchen, keep the credit attached (Dishpin keeps the site’s name and link on every web recipe), and buy the book if you find yourself cooking from it every week.

For recipes that start life as a video, see how to save a recipe from TikTok.