How to digitize old handwritten recipe cards

Scanning vs photographing recipe cards

A flatbed scanner if you have one, a phone if you don't. The Library of Congress's guide to scanning personal collections says to scan documents and 4 × 6 photos at 300 dpi. Use that for a 3 × 5 or 4 × 6 card, in color, since cards carry colored ink, printed borders and stains. The same guide suggests 400 or 600 dpi for photos you want to enlarge, so go that high only if you plan to print a card bigger than life.

A phone gets there without trying. A 12-megapixel photo is 4032 × 3024 pixels, so a 6-inch card that fills the frame comes out at about 670 pixels per inch, and still clears 300 with a wide border around it. What a phone does less well is even light and a flat, square card, which is what its document scanner is for.

On an iPhone, Apple's instructions are to open a note, tap the Attachments button and choose Scan Documents. In Auto mode it captures the page by itself, and you drag the corners to fit. The Files app has the same scanner. On Android, the Google Drive app scans from its camera button and saves the result as a PDF or a JPG.

Whichever you use:

• Take off paper clips, staples and old tape first, as the Library's guide says.
• Work by a window in daylight, with the phone held flat above the card and the card on a plain, dark surface so its edges stand out.
• Do the front and the back, then the next card. Doing all the fronts first means matching backs to fronts later.
• Name each file by recipe and side, such as “pound-cake-front.jpg”, with one folder per box. The Library's advice is to pick a naming system and stick to it.

Getting handwriting into searchable text

A picture of a card can't be searched for “buttermilk”. For that the words have to become text, either typed by you or read by software.

Typing it yourself is the slowest and the most accurate, and it makes you read every line, including the one that says to bake “till done”. Type the recipe as written, then add your own notes in brackets: [350°F, about 40 minutes].

Copy-text tools are built into phones. On an iPhone, Live Text lets you touch and hold the words in a photo and copy them. It needs an iPhone XS or later on iOS 15 or later. On Android, Google Lens does the same from a photo in Google Photos. Neither help page says anything about handwriting, so try one card before you plan a whole box around either. Google Drive's own image-to-text conversion asks for common fonts like Arial or Times New Roman, text at least 10 pixels high and files of 2 MB or less, which tells you it's built for print.

Some recipe apps read a photo with AI and write it up as ingredients and steps. Hedgehog Chef is one, and it takes handwriting (more below). Check the result against the card whatever the tool, because the errors cluster in the places that ruin a recipe: the numbers, the fractions and the units.

Keeping the original card and its image

Keep both. The image is your backup if the card is lost, and the card is the original if the files are. The Library of Congress's advice on storing works on paper comes down to a few rules for a recipe box:

• Store cards in acid- and lignin-free folders or a document box, or in polyester sleeves stiff enough to hold them flat. Skip the sleeves for cards written in pencil, because the Library warns that static on polyester film can lift pencil off the paper.
• No rubber bands, self-adhesive tape or glue on the cards, including tape to mend a tear.
• Somewhere cool, fairly dry (the Library's figure is about 35% relative humidity) and stable. Not the attic or the basement.
• As little light as possible, never direct sun. A card pinned to the fridge door gets light all day.
• Clean hands, and food and drink kept away. Cook from the copy.

For the images, the Library's rule is at least two copies, in different places, as far apart as practical: one on your computer and one on an external drive or in online storage. Every five to seven years, move them to whatever storage is current.

Sharing the collection with family

Give everyone the text and the images, in something they can open on their own phone. A single binder can only be in one kitchen, and a folder of photos with no text can't be searched.

• The free way: a shared folder in Google Drive or iCloud Drive with one subfolder of card images, plus one shared document with every recipe typed out under a heading, and a contents list at the top.
• The printed way: a family cookbook, made as a PDF and printed at a copy shop or by a print-on-demand service, with the card image beside each recipe. It makes a good gift around the holidays, when the box comes out anyway.
• A recipe app with household sharing, which works for the people you cook with. For cousins three states away, export or print from it.

Holidays are also when the people who can read the hard cards are in the same room. Bring the ones you couldn't make out. For sorting the collection once it's digital (by course, with a few tags for how you cook), see how to organize recipes in one place. Many old cards serve 6 or 8, and the free recipe scaler brings one down to 2 without the fractions headache. How to scale a recipe covers the parts that don't halve neatly, like salt, leavening and the pan.

Digitizing recipe cards in Hedgehog Chef

Hedgehog Chef is a recipe box, meal planner, shared shopping list and pantry in one web app, and its import reads photos of cards, cookbook pages and screenshots.

1. Open Import and choose the Photo tab. Tap Take photo, or Choose photos to use scans you've already made.
2. Add the back of the card as page 2. One recipe can have up to 6 pages, which you can turn, crop and reorder.
3. Tick Keep the scanned pages. The card is saved with the recipe as photos you can open full screen and zoom into. Leave Use the first page as the recipe photo unticked, so the card isn't the recipe's picture.
4. Tap Read 2 pages (Read recipe, if you only photographed the front). Claude reads the card, handwriting included, and writes it up as a title, ingredients and steps for you to check before saving. This is where you fix the T that should be a t.
5. File it in a binder such as “Family recipes”, and put the card's story in the recipe's notes.

After that it behaves like any other recipe: search finds it by any ingredient, it scales with real fractions, and cook mode turns “bake 40 minutes” into a timer. On the Family plan, two people share one kitchen, each with their own login. For everyone else, print a recipe in an index-card layout or save it as a PDF, send it as a web page, or export the whole library as web pages or Markdown whenever you like.

What it doesn't do. Each import is one recipe, so a box of 200 cards means 200 imports. Reading a photo uses AI, which has to be turned on, and counts toward 200 AI recipe imports a day (100 during the trial). It isn't an archive either: keep your own full-resolution scans in two places. There's no App Store or Google Play app yet, so on a phone it runs in the browser. Kitchens hold two people at most and binders have no public link. And it's paid: after a 14-day trial without a card it's $5.99 a month for one person or $9.99 for two (see pricing). If you're weighing other apps, our round-up of recipe manager apps compares eight.