Importing & Creating Recipes

How to Save a Recipe Manually or from a Photo

Published 30 July 2026

How to Save a Recipe Manually or from a Photo

Quick answer: Open Crumb, tap Add Recipe, choose Photo or Type it in. For a photo, snap a picture of a handwritten card, notebook page, or cookbook — Crumb’s AI reads the handwriting or print and turns it into a structured recipe. For typing, just paste or write out the ingredients and steps yourself.

Step-by-step: from a photo

  1. Open Crumb and tap Add Recipe.
  2. Choose Photo.
  3. Take a picture of the recipe — a handwritten card, a notebook page, a cookbook page, or even a screenshot.
  4. Crumb reads the photo and pulls out the title, ingredients, and steps.
  5. Review the extracted recipe, fix anything that didn’t read perfectly, and tap Save.

Adding recipe manually Adding recipe manually

Step-by-step: typing it in

  1. Open Crumb and tap Add Recipe.
  2. Choose Type it in.
  3. Add a title, then add each ingredient and step using the + button.
  4. Fill in servings, cook time, and any tags you’d like.
  5. Tap Save.

Adding recipe manually

Why this matters

Not every recipe worth keeping has a link. The best ones are often the ones with no digital trace at all — grandma’s handwriting on a stained index card, a page torn from an old cookbook. This is how those get preserved properly, instead of living as one more photo buried in your camera roll.

Quick tips

  • Photos of handwriting work best in good light, straight-on, with the full recipe in frame.
  • If the handwriting is very old or faded, Crumb will still try — just double-check the ingredients on the review screen before saving.
  • Once saved this way, you can still add the memory behind it — who it belonged to, when you first made it, and photos of the finished dish.
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