Updated 23 Nov 2021. Originally published 4 Mar 2019.

For years, I’ve been using Living Cookbook software from Radium Technologies, and I love it.  However, it has two main drawbacks.  1) It’s Windows-only software, which is tying me to this operating system.  2) More significantly, a year or so ago, Radium Technologies apparently went quietly defunct, and they are no longer developing or supporting the software.  Which is a real problem…so I’ve had to find something new, and figure out how to organize my recipes on my computer all over again.

What I Was Looking For

I was looking for something that is not primarily app-based because, as I’ve noted previously, I don’t use my smartphone often and, more importantly, I don’t have a ton of space on my phone for storing my large recipe collection.  However, I would prefer for it to be cross-platform in order to keep my options open down the road.  I need to be able to import my existing collection without too terribly much hassle.  I do not care about what recipes a particular software solution comes with.  (Honestly, I’ve never understood that.  I’m not buying a cookbook; I’m buying a recipe management solution.  Why would I want thousands of recipes pre-installed, so the first thing I have to do is delete all the extraneous recipes I won’t use?!  I want to organize my recipes!)

Cook’n

After doing some preliminary research to narrow down the options, the first solution I tried was Cook’n.  I was provided with the software a few years ago to facilitate my review.  You haven’t read that review yet because I’ve been struggling with the software on and off all this time.  It has some great features, and I wanted to love it.  But try as I might, I just can’t love it.

My issues with it, ironically, boil down to its simplicity.  Cook’n makes use of fewer fields than any other software out there.  In and of itself, this is not necessarily a problem.  The owner suggests simply adding all “extra” information to the end of the “directions” field.  I find this completely counter-intuitive, because they aren’t part of the directions (“notes” would make more sense), but it would work.

Unfortunately, when you import from any of the “supported” software formats, this information is not moved into the directions field.  It’s simply dropped altogether.  This information includes not only notes but, most importantly, the source information for the recipe.  The author, source, and URL are all completely lost on import.  Moreover, a handful of recipes didn’t import at all.  The import helpfully offered a status showing how many of how many recipes had imported so far.  But then at the end it said “import failed” and didn’t provide any further information.  I had to manually count the number of recipes in each folder to determine what was missing.

It also makes little sense to me that software with a heavy emphasis on importing from the internet and sharing to the internet does not have a dedicated location for a (clickable) URL in a recipe.  The best you can do is put the URL as text in the directions field.  This seems clunky to me and, frankly, sub-par for modern recipe software.

Another area where the simplicity of the design is a bit of a struggle for me is in the folder organization.  Sub-folders are not possible, so all my sub-folders got rolled up and treated as main folders.  This is more annoying than problematic, but it’s something to be aware of if you have a heavy folder structure to your existing database.

If you’re starting completely from scratch (not importing an existing recipe collection), Cook’n may be a good fit for you, because you can enter the information in the format it allows for and not lose data.  It is pretty easy to add a recipe, which is nice since that’s one of the primary things you have to be able to do with the software!  There’s even an option to “bulk import” the ingredients list — but the software then breaks it down into the measurements, the ingredient type, etc., line by line so it can use the information in shopping lists.  I also really like the format it uses for ingredients, which mirrors the way we typically write out recipes.

If you need to capture a recipe from the internet, you can do that with relative ease, as well.  It’s a little clunky, in my opinion, navigating to a recipe if you already know the exact page and aren’t just generally browsing.  However, once you’re there, you can import the recipe with just one or a few clicks (depending on what format the recipe is in).

There’s even an option for importing a recipe from an image, although it’s a little hit-or-miss, as is the nature of text recognition in an image.

It has good built-in nutrition support.  There are also options for building menus and shopping lists, which seem to be fairly easy to use, although I never got as far as trying them since I couldn’t get my recipe collection to import acceptably.

The only downside to me when adding recipes is that images can’t be dragged-and-dropped.  Instead, the image has to be downloaded, then directly uploaded to the software.

Still, the few quirks of Cook’n are pretty minor if you’re starting out fresh to organize your recipes.  Cook’n works on Windows or Mac, and also syncs to mobile devices.  It’s pricey, though, at $79.95.

Paprika

It seems to me that last time I was looking, Paprika wasn’t a viable option, and I can’t remember why.  It is available for Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Android.  Each of these options has to be purchased separately (although any one license can be used on 3 devices of the same type).  However, even at that, it’s pretty affordable.  Most people will probably only need a total of two — one desktop and one mobile option.  Cloud syncing is free for all users, so if you have, say, the Windows and Android versions, you can sync your recipes between the two.

Paprika for Mac or Windows is $29.99, and either mobile app is $5.99.  So even if you have to buy all four, you’re still paying less than for Cook’n.  (And most people will probably need to pay about $36 at most.)

Paprika does import from Living Cookbook.  Frustratingly, it did not provide a progress update, so when it was taking ages to import my (very large) database, I had no way of knowing how close it was to finished.  It did show an indicator that it was working, just no indication of how far it had gotten.  It took a solid hour, so this was a little nerve-wracking.  It did, however, successfully get everything imported.

On the down side, Paprika also has some issues importing nested folders — or, apparently, multiple cookbooks.  This meant that not only did all my folders get rolled over to top level, they were no longer even divided by cookbook.  It appears this was to be changed in version 3.0, which has subcategories.  However, the Windows version was updated later than the Mac, iOS, and Android versions, and it hadn’t been updated yet when I first imported my database, so I had to work around that and can’t speak to how smoothly the import for that works now.

Paprika will merge any folders with the same names on import, which resulted in a real mess.  After several attempts at deleting the entire database, tweaking things, and reimporting, I discovered that this was the problem.  You can learn from my mistakes.  Rename folders as necessary before exporting from your old software, so every folder has a unique name, and your folders will stay properly separated.  (I ended up just adding prefixes to my folders, to designate which cookbook I had them in, in Living Cookbook.)  I just saved you the six hours I spent exporting and importing repeatedly.  You’re welcome.

Despite the quirks, it did import almost all of my recipe information, as far as I can tell.  The titles, ingredients, directions, source name, and images are all intact.  Existing nutrition information is still present.  Even the categories (tags) and ratings are intact.

It does appear that author information was stripped out, but the source information was kept intact, so I can live with that.  It would be better if the import would compile the author and source so both end up in this field, but I can work with this.  Where there were links present, the links are also kept intact.  (And yes, Paprika actually designates a place for them and makes them active links.)

The one major bit the import missed was anything Living Cookbook filed in the “tips” field.  I’m guessing this was an oversight, because I was impressed to see that “comments,” “notes,” and “author notes” are all imported to Paprika’s notes field.  They don’t overwrite each other, either; they’re aggregated.

Overall, I’m finding Paprika to be an excellent balance of simplicity and complexity.  It has as many fields as it needs to, and no more.  And apart from a couple minor tweaks I would make to the importer if I were in charge, it does a pretty remarkable job of pulling in recipes from more complex software and properly fitting them to its more simplified interface.

There’s a built-in browser that can be used to capture recipes from the web.  With a properly-formatted recipe, this is exceptionally easy.  I was able to download a recipe from here on the blog with one click.  (Well, two clicks, really, because one click pulls the information and a second click confirms that it did so correctly.)  If the recipe doesn’t have readable formatting, you can still bring in the information in just a few clicks.  There’s also a browser bookmarklet, which is just as easy.

As with Cook’n, if you want to add an image, you can’t drag-and-drop it, which is a bit annoying.  If you add the recipe with a single click using the built-in browser or the bookmarklet, it pulls the picture in, too.  But if it misses it or it pulls the wrong one, you have to download the image first before you can add it.

The only other significant feature I wish it had is the ability to select multiple recipes and assign them all to a category at once.  This would make life a lot easier when attempting to reorganize your recipes or when adding a lot of recipes at once.  Also, the Windows version still only allows a single image per recipe, but I assume that will change with version 3.0, since multiple images are a 3.0 feature on the other platforms.  [Update: it does.]

All in all, these are minor quirks, and I’ve been very pleased, so far, with how well Paprika does what it’s supposed to do.  Sync has been a little glitchy for me, but anything I’ve done within the software itself since getting my initial import sorted out has just simply worked, and for a very reasonable price.  (I haven’t yet tried the meal planning features, so I’ll have to update on those at a later date.)

Unless your needs are significantly different from mine, I would say Paprika is probably about the best option on the market today for organizing recipes on your computer.

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