How to import recipes from any website, video or photo
Import recipes from websites, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, photos, Notes and other recipe apps: what works, how deep each one reads, and what doesn't yet.
Sugo can import a recipe from any recipe website, from a TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat Spotlight or Pinterest post, from a ChatGPT conversation someone shared with you, from a photo of a cookbook page or a handwritten card, and from text sitting in your notes. It can also bring over your whole library from Paprika, Crouton, AnyList, ReciMe or Pestle, and you can always type a recipe in by hand.
Each of those routes has its own automated tests in Sugo's backend, and they run on every change we ship. That is also why this list stops where it does. A few things people ask for, like PDFs and recipes posted in comment threads, have no tested route yet, so they sit in their own section at the end. We also ran live links from other places people ask about, and the results are in a table below: Marmiton, 750g, NYT Cooking, Tasty, Cookpad, Directo al Paladar, Karlos Arguiñano's recipes, a Substack post, a published Google Doc and a post on X all imported in full.
The routes differ in how much work Sugo has to do. A recipe website usually hands over a clean, structured copy of the recipe. A reel usually hands over three hashtags and someone talking fast. The rest of this post goes source by source.
How to import a recipe into Sugo
Most imports start at the Share button. On iPhone, iPad and Android, share a link, a photo or a block of text to Sugo from whatever app it is in. Inside Sugo, the add-recipe screen has tabs for pasting a link, taking or choosing a photo, and typing a recipe out. On iPhone and iPad there is also an "Add to Sugo" action in Shortcuts that takes a link or some text, so a recipe can come in from an automation.
Share the same link twice and Sugo hands back the recipe you already saved instead of importing it again.
What Sugo can import from, at a glance
| Source | What Sugo reads first | When that isn't enough |
|---|---|---|
| Recipe websites | The structured recipe the site publishes for search engines | The page text itself |
| TikTok | The caption | The video's subtitle track |
| Instagram reels and posts | The caption | The reel's audio, transcribed |
| Facebook reels and videos | The post text | The video's audio, transcribed |
| YouTube and Shorts | The full description, and any recipe link in it | The video's transcript |
| Snapchat Spotlight | The caption | The snap's subtitle track, even with no caption at all |
| The pin description | ||
| ChatGPT shared chats | ChatGPT's replies | |
| A photo | Everything printed or written in the frame | |
| Text, including a whole Notes note | Your wording, shorthand and all | A recipe link in the text is imported first |
| Paprika, Crouton, AnyList, ReciMe, Pestle | Your whole library, field by field |
Importing a recipe from a website
Most recipe sites embed a structured copy of every recipe in the page, in a format called schema.org. Readers never see it. It exists for Google, and it is the most reliable source there is, because the site filled in its own ingredients, steps, yield and timings. Sugo reads it first. When a site doesn't publish it, Sugo looks for the older microdata format, and when that is missing too, it reads the page text and pulls the recipe out of the prose.
Nutrition comes from the site when the page publishes it. When it doesn't, Sugo adds up the ingredients. It never asks a model to guess a number.
A page with more than one recipe on it, like a roast with its gravy or a cake with its frosting, comes in as up to three linked recipes, so the gravy doesn't get folded into the roast's method. If a page only introduces a recipe and links to the full version somewhere else, Sugo follows that link once and imports the real page. And some sites turn away anything that doesn't look like a normal browser visit, so Sugo retries a refused request before it gives up.
A page that shows nothing until you log in can't be imported, and neither can a page that has been taken down. In both cases Sugo tells you the page may have been removed or made private, and saves nothing. Behind a paywall, Sugo gets what the page shows a visitor: a subscriber-only Substack post in the test below came through as only the lines above the paywall. Once a recipe is in your library, though, it no longer depends on the site. When a recipe site deletes the page, your copy stays.
Recipe sites and apps we tested
Automated tests use saved copies of pages, so on 24 September 2026 we also ran live links from the sites and apps people most often ask about through the same importer the app uses. Each row is one link on one day, and another page on the same site could behave differently.
| Where the recipe was | What happened |
|---|---|
| Allrecipes, BBC Good Food, Serious Eats, Tasty, Cookpad | Imported in full |
| NYT Cooking, a subscription site | Imported in full |
| Marmiton and 750g | Imported in full |
| Directo al Paladar, and Karlos Arguiñano's recipes on Hogarmania | Imported in full |
| A Substack post with the recipe written out | Imported in full |
| A subscriber-only Substack post | Only the lines above the paywall |
| A Google Doc shared with File, Share, Publish to web | Imported in full |
| A Google Doc edit link | Sugo sees an empty page |
| A post on X with the recipe in the post | Imported in full |
| A thread on X with the steps in the replies | The ingredients from the first post only |
| Medium, Tumblr | The site refused the request |
| Reddit, Notion, Bluesky, Vimeo | Sugo sees an empty page |
Where Sugo sees an empty page, it says it couldn't find a recipe and saves nothing. For all of the failures the fix is the same: select the recipe text, copy it, and share it to Sugo as text.
Recipes in videos, where Sugo listens
In a cooking video, the recipe is usually split between the caption, what the creator says out loud, and sometimes a link to their blog. Sugo reads the caption first. If the whole recipe is written there, Sugo stops and uses it. If the caption is a dish name and a row of hashtags, Sugo goes and gets the words spoken in the video. And if the caption links to a recipe page, Sugo imports that page, because the creator's own written recipe is better than anything reconstructed from a voiceover.
One recipe, with the quantities the creator gave
How Sugo gets hold of the spoken part depends on the platform.
TikTok
Most TikTok videos carry a subtitle track, written by the creator or generated by TikTok. Sugo reads that track, and uses the caption alone when a video has none. Share links and short links both work. Photo posts import from their caption; Sugo doesn't read the individual slides.
Reels don't come with a subtitle track Sugo can read, so Sugo downloads the reel's audio and runs it through speech-to-text. The transcript and the caption then go into extraction together. Posts, reels and share links all work, and when Instagram's embed refuses to show a post that is public, Sugo reads the caption from the post page instead.
Sunday lasagna al forno
A proper Sunday ragu, simmered until it darkens, layered with béchamel and baked until the top sheet blisters and the edges catch on the dish.
Step 1
Warm the olive oil (2 tbsp) in a wide pan and soften the onion (1) with the garlic (3 cloves) until sweet, about 8 minutes. Turn up the heat, add the ground beef (1 lb) and brown it properly.
Coming up next
Sugo doesn't read comments, on purpose. Quantities posted in the replies come from strangers, they are often wrong, and there is no reliable way to tell the creator's own comment apart from someone's guess. Posts from private accounts can't be imported.
Facebook works the same way as Instagram: Sugo transcribes the audio of reels and videos, up to 30 minutes of it. Links from the app's share button and fb.watch links both work. A post you can only see while logged in to Facebook can't be imported, because Sugo can't see its text.
YouTube and YouTube Shorts
YouTube descriptions are long, and they often hold the whole recipe or a link to it on the creator's site. Sugo reads the full description (not the two lines shown under the video) and follows a recipe link if it finds one. It fetches the transcript only when the description turns out not to be a recipe. Shorts, youtu.be links, live streams and embedded videos all import. There is more on this in how to save a recipe from a YouTube video.
Snapchat Spotlight
Spotlight videos often come with a subtitle track, and Sugo reads it. A snap with no caption at all can still come in as a recipe, built from what the creator said. Public stories aren't supported yet.
Words that sound like food
Transcripts have a problem captions don't: people talk loosely. A Spanish-language reel in Sugo's test suite has the narrator seasoning chicken and saying "le damos una buena chocolateada", a turn of phrase with the word "chocolate" buried inside it. An earlier version of the importer added chocolate to the ingredients. Now every ingredient that came from a transcript is checked against what was actually said, and one that only exists inside a longer word is dropped.
Two other rules apply to every video. When the creator never gave a quantity, Sugo leaves it blank. And because most videos show the method rather than saying it, a post that lists ingredients with no written steps gets short steps drafted from the ingredients and the dish. Those steps carry every time and temperature the creator stated and leave out any they didn't. Read them before you cook. Saving recipes from TikTok and Instagram goes into why video recipes are so hard to keep in the first place.
Sugo reads the pin's description, along with the creator and the image. Pin links from any regional Pinterest site work, and so do pin.it short links. Plenty of pins carry only a dish name. When there is nothing to import, Sugo tells you the pin shows the dish but not the recipe. If the pin was saved from a website, opening its source and sharing that page usually gets you the full recipe.
Recipes from ChatGPT
If you worked out a recipe with ChatGPT, share the conversation link with Sugo. Sugo reads ChatGPT's replies and drops your own messages before anything goes to extraction. The recipe is credited to ChatGPT.
Importing a recipe from a photo or screenshot
Take a photo from the add-recipe screen, pick one from your library, or share an image to Sugo from another app. Sugo reads the whole image with a vision model, printed text and handwriting alike, and turns it into a recipe. That covers a page from a cookbook, a card from a family recipe tin, and a screenshot of a recipe someone sent you.
It is one photo per import for now. For a recipe that runs across a spread, photograph both pages in one frame, or import the first page and type the rest in. Saving a recipe from a cookbook page has more on what a single page leaves out, and digitising handwritten recipe cards covers the family tin.
Recipes in Notes, emails and messages
When a recipe lives in the iPhone Notes app, open the note, tap Share and pick Sugo: the whole note comes in, with nothing to select first. For a recipe in an email or a message thread, select the text and share that. Sugo copes with shorthand, typos and a mix of languages, keeps your wording, and writes a title if there isn't one. If the text contains a link to a recipe page, Sugo tries that page first and falls back to the text if the page doesn't work out.
Typing a recipe in by hand
The Manual tab saves exactly what you type, ingredient sections included, and no AI touches it. It works offline and syncs when you're back online. Turn on have sugo polish this and the draft goes through the text route above instead.
Moving from Paprika, Crouton, AnyList, ReciMe or Pestle
Under Account, Sugo can import a whole library from five other apps:
| App | How it connects |
|---|---|
| Paprika | Sign in to your Paprika account, or upload a .paprikarecipes export |
| Crouton | Upload your .crumb export, or a zip of them |
| AnyList | Sign in to your AnyList account |
| ReciMe | Sign in to your ReciMe account |
| Pestle | Upload your .pestle export |
These imports map each recipe across field by field, with no AI rereading anything. Ingredient sections and nutrition come with them, and nutrition written as text, like "320 kcal", becomes numbers Sugo can use. Crouton exports bring their photos. You see your library in a preview before anything is written, Sugo doesn't store your password for the other app, and a recipe you had already saved from the same website is linked to your existing copy instead of duplicated. A single run takes up to 2,000 recipes. If you are still choosing between apps, the five-way comparison is the long version.
Recipes in other languages
Sugo saves a recipe in the language it was written in and doesn't translate it. English, French and Spanish recipes get the full import. A recipe in another language is still saved to your library.
What Sugo can't import yet
These are the requests we hear that have no tested route today, and what to do in the meantime.
- Sugo can't read PDFs. Share one and it asks for a link or a photo instead, and a screenshot of the page works fine.
- It doesn't read comments. If you trust whoever posted the recipe in the replies, copy the comment and share it as text.
- It takes one photo per import.
- It reads a video's caption and spoken words, not its frames, so text that only appears on screen or on carousel slides is missed. When the quantities only flash up on screen, screenshot that frame and import the photo.
- It doesn't visit profiles, so "recipe in bio" is a dead end. Open the bio link yourself and share the recipe page it leads to.
- It can't see private posts, or posts that only show up when you're logged in.
- Links from Reddit, Notion, Bluesky, Medium and Tumblr didn't work in the test above, and Threads has no dedicated support. Copy the recipe and share it as text. X works when the whole recipe is in the one post you share.
Try it on the recipe you lost last week
Most people's saved recipes are spread over a camera roll, a few saved-video folders and a notes app. Every route above ends in the same place: a recipe with a real ingredient list that you can search, check against your pantry and cook from one step at a time.
Sugo is free on iPhone, iPad and Mac, on Android, and in any browser at app.sugo.kitchen. If the recipe you wanted last week is still buried in a saved folder somewhere, download Sugo and share it in.