How to digitize handwritten recipes
Family recipe cards fade, get spilled on, and live in one drawer. A photo plus a few minutes of tidying gets them somewhere you can read with wet hands in a kitchen.
Photograph the card properly
Lay the card flat in daylight, fill the frame with it, and keep the camera square to the paper. Shadows across a line of handwriting are the main reason a word gets misread. If the card has two sides, photograph both.
Use the Photo tab
Choose Photo on the import screen and add the image. The app reads the text on it and builds a draft recipe with ingredients and directions. Keep the original photograph too: it is the record of the handwriting, and future you will want to see it.
Check the handwriting against the card
Old cards use shorthand that no reader gets right the first time: a pinch, a slow oven, a number with no unit. Compare the draft against the photo line by line, fix the amounts, and add the temperatures and times the card assumed you already knew. Recipes built from a photo are marked as AI-read, so it stays clear which parts came from the card and which you supplied.
Record whose recipe it is
Put the family name, the cook's name and the occasion in the notes field. That is the part that is lost first, and it is the part that makes a collection worth keeping.
Do a batch, not one at a time
Photograph a whole box of cards in one sitting, then digitize them over a few evenings. Saving is fast; checking is the slow part, so spread the checking out rather than rushing the whole box at once.