How to save recipes from Facebook posts and reels

The quickest way to keep a recipe from Facebook is to share the post or reel to a recipe app that reads it and stores a copy. Facebook's own save button works as a bookmark, and screenshots work for a short recipe, but both leave you scrolling and squinting later. Below is what each option keeps, and how to handle the awkward cases: reels where the quantities are only spoken, and recipes posted in private groups.

What Facebook's save button keeps

Tap the three dots on a post and choose Save, and it lands in your Saved items, which you can sort into collections. That is useful as a reminder. As a way to keep a recipe, it has the same problems as every in-app save:

• It is a pointer, not a copy. If the person deletes the post, leaves the group or changes who can see it, your saved item goes with it.
• You cannot search the ingredients. Saved items are a list of posts. Finding "that chicken traybake from the neighbourhood group" means scrolling.
• It does not help at the stove. The recipe is wherever the poster put it: in the caption, in a photo of a card, in the comments, or only in the reel's voiceover.

Option 1: a screenshot

For a recipe written out in full in one short post, a screenshot is fine. It breaks down when the post runs longer than one screen, when the recipe is in a reel, or when you have a few hundred of them, because a camera roll is a poor recipe box. We wrote about why screenshots end up lost.

Option 2: copy the text

Long-press the caption, copy it, and paste it into your notes or a recipe app. It keeps the words but loses the layout, and it does nothing for reels, where the recipe is often never written down.

Option 3: share it to a recipe app

A recipe app that can read Facebook keeps a usable copy. It takes the post's text, listens to the audio of a reel or video when it needs to, and turns that into an ingredient list and steps.

In Sugo it works like this:

1. On the post or reel, tap Share, then Copy link (or share straight to Sugo from the share sheet on iPhone, iPad or Android).
2. In Sugo, paste the link on the add-recipe screen. Links from the share button and fb.watch links both work.
3. Sugo reads the post text first. If the text is only a dish name and some hashtags, it transcribes the reel's audio (up to 30 minutes of it) so spoken quantities become real ingredient lines.

The result is a recipe you can search, scale and send to a shopping list, and it stays in your library if the post disappears.

The two hard cases

Private groups. A post you can only see while logged in to Facebook cannot be imported by any outside app, including Sugo, because the app cannot see its text. For those, copy the text and share it to Sugo as text, or screenshot the recipe and import the screenshot as a photo. Sugo reads the words in a photo and builds the recipe from them.

A recipe in a photo. Plenty of Facebook recipes are a photo of a recipe card or a page. Save the image to your phone and import it as a photo; Sugo reads printed and handwritten text, which is also how people digitise handwritten recipe cards.

Give credit, and say thanks

A recipe someone shared in a group is still theirs. Sugo keeps the link to the original post with the recipe, so you can find the cook again, and a quick comment telling them you made it is a good way to say thanks.

Questions people ask

Can I save a Facebook reel recipe?

Yes, if the reel is public. Share its link to a recipe app that transcribes video. Sugo reads the reel's text, then its audio if the text is not a recipe, and saves the result as a structured recipe.

Where do saved Facebook posts go?

To Saved, in the Facebook menu, where you can group them into collections. They are bookmarks: if the original post is deleted or hidden, it disappears from your saved items too.

Can I save recipes from a private Facebook group?

Not by link, because apps outside Facebook cannot see posts that need a login. Copy the text into the app, or import a screenshot of the recipe as a photo.

For the other platforms, see how to save recipes from TikTok and Instagram and from YouTube, or every way to import a recipe for the full list.