How to Import Recipes from Anywhere — YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Websites & Photos

Good recipes come from everywhere. A crispy gnocchi bake off your TikTok feed, a curry from a fifteen-minute YouTube video, a pasta from an Instagram Reel, the roast chicken on a food blog you trust, your nan’s handwritten card in the back of a drawer. The problem was never finding recipes — it’s that they end up scattered across bookmarks, screenshots, saved posts and paper, none of which you can actually cook from. This guide is about how to import recipes from anywhere into one clean, organised place, so wherever a recipe comes from, it lands somewhere useful.

The idea behind importing recipes from anywhere is simple: instead of storing a link or a video, you get the recipe out of wherever it lives and into a structured form — ingredients with quantities, method in numbered steps, a title and serving size at the top. That’s the difference between a saved post you’ll never open and a recipe you’ll make on a Tuesday.

Below is a source-by-source overview of how importing works from each place, with a link to the full guide for each one. Then we cover what happens after import — because a clean recipe is only worth having if you can cook, scale, plan and shop from it.

Import Recipes at a Glance

Every source works the same way at heart: Whiskely reads the original — a caption, a transcript, a web page, or an image — and its AI hands back a structured recipe. What differs is what gets read.

Source	How the import works	Best for
YouTube	Reads the video’s transcript/captions	Long cooking videos where the recipe takes 3 of 15 minutes
Instagram	Reads the caption, Reel audio and on-screen text	Reels and posts you find while scrolling
TikTok	Reads the voiceover, on-screen text and pinned comment	Voiceover-only clips with no written recipe
Websites	Reads the page and strips ads, pop-ups and the life story	Food blogs and recipe sites — the #1 recipe source
Photos	Reads handwriting or printed text from an image	Handwritten recipe cards and cookbook pages
Chat with AI	Generates a recipe from a plain-language request	When you have an idea but no source to import

Import Recipes from YouTube

The average cooking video is fifteen minutes long; the actual recipe takes about three. Rather than scrubbing back and forth while your onions catch, you copy the video link and paste it in. Whiskely reads the transcript — the captions YouTube generates for nearly every video — and pulls out the ingredients, the method in order, and the serving size. It works with any video that has captions, which is almost all of them.

For the full walkthrough, edge cases (silent technique videos, ancient uncaptioned uploads), and how to make it a habit, see how to get a recipe from a YouTube video.

Import Recipes from Instagram

Instagram is one of the best places to discover food and one of the worst places to keep a recipe — captions cut off after three lines, steps are separated by emojis, and a collection is just a grid of thumbnails. Importing fixes that: from a recipe post or Reel, tap Share and send it to Whiskely. The AI reads the caption, the Reel’s audio, and any on-screen text, then turns the lot into a clean, structured recipe in your library. Instagram keeps the visual; you keep the recipe.

The full guide — including what gets extracted from Reels and how to build the save-and-share habit — is how to save recipes from Instagram.

Import Recipes from TikTok

TikTok recipes are especially slippery: the method is often only spoken as a voiceover, measurements flash past as on-screen text, and the real recipe sometimes hides in a pinned comment. Because so much of a TikTok recipe is audio, reading the video matters — a recipe that was never written down anywhere still comes out as text you can read at a glance. Tap Share, choose Whiskely (or paste the link), and the AI stitches the caption, voiceover, overlays and pinned comment into one recipe.

For the four manual saving options, why each falls short, and the full import flow, see how to save recipes from TikTok.

Import Recipes from Websites

Recipe blogs are still where most of us find the good stuff — but they’re built to keep you scrolling past ads, not to be cooked from. Import strips all that away: paste (or share) the recipe URL, and Whiskely reads the page and keeps only the recipe — the title, the full ingredient list, and the method as numbered steps. The ads, the pop-ups and the 1,500-word life story stay behind. Because you’re saving the recipe rather than a link, it doesn’t matter if the site later rearranges the page or disappears.

The full guide — including an honest comparison of bookmarks, screenshots, copy-paste and printing — is how to save recipes from a website.

Import Recipes from Photos & Handwritten Cards

Some of your best recipes aren’t online at all. They’re on a splattered index card in a familiar hand, or a page in a cookbook that’s falling apart. Importing a photo digitises them properly: not just a picture in your camera roll, but a clean, editable recipe. Lay the card flat, get even light, take the photo, and let the AI read it — working through cursive, abbreviations like “tbsp”, and the shorthand people use on recipe cards, then separating the ingredients from the method. Treat the scan as a strong first draft you can correct in a tap, and the paper original can go back somewhere safe.

For the full scanning workflow, tips for faded or stained cards, and batch-digitising a whole recipe box, see how to scan a recipe from a photo.

Create a Recipe by Chatting with AI

Sometimes there’s no source to import — you just have an idea. “A weeknight traybake with the chicken thighs in the fridge”, “something vegetarian with lentils and spinach”. You can describe what you want and Whiskely will generate a full recipe: ingredients, quantities and method, ready to save alongside everything you’ve imported. It’s the one entry point that starts from nothing rather than from a link, a video or a photo — handy when inspiration arrives before a recipe does.

What Happens After You Import

Getting the recipe out of its original home is only half the point. Every import — whatever the source — lands in the same place and unlocks the same tools, which is where importing recipes from anywhere actually pays off:

• Everything in one organised library. A recipe from a YouTube video sits next to one from a blog, an Instagram Reel and a scanned card — all searchable by name or ingredient, and groupable into collections like “Nan’s recipes” or “Sunday dinners”.
• Clean ingredients and steps. Whiskely shows you the extracted recipe before saving so you can check it. Vague measurements (“a good glug of oil”) are kept as-is rather than invented, so you know which bits are down to taste.
• Guided cook mode. A clean, full-screen, step-by-step view that doesn’t lock the screen mid-chop or autoplay the next video while you’re at the hob.
• Edit and scale with AI. Change the serving size and every quantity rescales — spices included, and handling the bits that don’t just double neatly — so a recipe for two feeds four without mental maths over a hot pan. You can also swap ingredients you don’t have, or nudge a recipe lighter, spicier or vegetarian.
• Meal planner. Drop imported recipes into a plan for the week so you’re not deciding what to cook at 6pm.
• Shopping list. Send the ingredients to a list in a tap, organised so you’re not zig-zagging the supermarket.

That’s the whole point of importing rather than bookmarking: a saved link you have to fight through every time, versus a saved recipe you just cook from.

The Habit Worth Building

Most of us have a graveyard of good intentions — a Favourites folder, a bookmarks pile, a stack of screenshots we meant to cook from. The fix is a small habit: the moment a recipe stops your scroll or catches your eye, import it in the same breath, so it’s clean and waiting the next time you’re deciding what to make.

Wherever the recipe comes from — a video, a link, a Reel or a fading card in a familiar hand — the goal is the same: get it somewhere safe, searchable and ready to cook. That’s exactly what Whiskely is built for. When you’re ready, download Whiskely and import the one recipe you’d most like to cook this week. If you’d rather look around first, our homepage walks through everything Whiskely can turn into a clean, cook-ready recipe.