How to digitize handwritten recipe cards with your iPhone

The box of cards is the most valuable cookbook you own and the most fragile. Here's how to get it onto your phone in an afternoon, what the technology can and can't read, and why you should keep the box anyway.

First, decide what you want

There are two different projects hiding in "digitize the cards," and they want different tools.

Preserving the cards: your grandmother's handwriting, the butter stain, the "DO NOT OVERBAKE" underlined twice. This is a photo project. Good light, every card, front and back.
Cooking from them: ingredients you can check off, steps you can read with floury hands, a copy you can text to your sister. This is a text project, and it starts with the photos but doesn't end there.

Do the first one regardless. It takes an hour and it's the part that can't be redone once a card is lost.

Photographing cards so the text reads

Whether you're keeping the photos or feeding them to recognition software, the same four things decide whether the writing is legible.

Daylight, no flash. Near a window, card on a plain surface. Flash puts a white blob in the middle of the ink.
Straight down, filling the frame. Hold the phone parallel to the card. The yellow grid in the Camera app helps; a tilted card gives you keystoned text that recognition struggles with.
One card per photo. Two cards side by side, or a card on top of a clipping, confuses every reader there is.
Back of the card too. Half the directions in any family box are on the back, usually ending with "then bake as usual."

The free option for the text: the Notes app's document scanner (tap the camera icon in a note, Scan Documents) straightens the card and lets you select and copy the text with Live Text. It's good on clear printing and fair on cursive. You'll still be pasting into a note and tidying by hand.

What handwriting recognition gets wrong

Be ready for this so it doesn't feel like failure. Current recognition, including Apple's, reads neat block capitals well, ordinary cursive reasonably, and faded pencil poorly. The predictable misreads on recipe cards are the abbreviations: "tsp" becomes "tap," "lbs" becomes "Ibs," "c." for cup gets lost, and fractions written by hand are a coin flip. Two-column cards (ingredients left, directions right) often come back as one scrambled column. Anything written up the margin at an angle is gone.

Plan on reading each recipe once after it's scanned. It's a few minutes a card, and it's the moment you catch "1 cup salt" before anyone cooks it.

Turning the photos into recipes

If you want checklists and steps rather than photos of text, you need something that understands a recipe's shape: which lines are ingredients, which are directions, where the title is. Some recipe apps have a scan feature built for exactly this.

We make one, Thyme, so here's the maker's version. Its Scan door takes a photo of a card or a cookbook page and gives you back a recipe with the ingredients as a checklist and the directions as steps. It handles two-column cards and fixes the common cursive misreads ("tap" to tsp, "Ibs" to lb) on its own, and when a photo isn't readable it says so instead of inventing a recipe. The scanned card itself isn't used as the recipe photo, so your cookbook doesn't fill with index cards; add a photo of the dish the next time you make it. Scan is free, like every other way of adding a recipe.

Keep the box

Once the recipes are on your phone, the cards stop being the only copy and start being an heirloom. Put them back in the box, put the box somewhere dry, and let the next person find the butter stain.