How to scan, upload, and share recipes online.

Move from the recipe box to the recipe folder with these easy online PDF tips.

With so many recipe sources, from blog pages and recipe apps to family recipes and cookbooks, it can feel near impossible to wrap your arms around your favorites. However, with a little bit of strategy, you can get all your best picks in one place for simpler meal prep and easy sharing. Learn how to digitize your recipe archives to save and share recipes online.

Why share recipes online?

Sharing recipes online offers several perks that can enhance the cooking and sharing experience. Here’s a bulleted list highlighting some of the main advantages:

• Easy organization. Share recipes online for a well-organized digital collection that’s easy to categorize and search, saving time and effort.
• Convenient sharing. Share with friends and family worldwide at the click of a button, making it effortless to spread your culinary creations.
• Collaboration and feedback. Invite others to contribute, receive feedback, and improve your recipes based on diverse perspectives.
• Effortless editing. Easily update recipes when needed, avoiding the hassle of reprinting or redistributing.
• Environmental benefits. Reduce paper waste and clutter by sharing recipes digitally, contributing to a greener lifestyle.
• Preservation. Being able to make a cookbook with handwritten recipes to share online can help protect your original ideas in case paper fades over time.

Step 1: Scan recipes to your desktop.

• Find your recipes. Gather all of your favorites from all of your sources — websites, apps, books, handwritten notes, you name it.
• File and organize. Which are hardcopy recipes? Which are online? Organize accordingly; you’ll want to scan the hard copies to a PDF, while the online recipes will only need to be converted to a PDF. More on that next.
• Scan, PDF, and upload. Scan your hardcopy recipes. (If you don’t have a scanner, most shipping and office supply stores do.) This will create a digital PDF that you can save to your desktop.

Step 2: Upload and share your recipes online.

• Save as PDFs. Take your online sources and save each webpage as a PDF. You should be left with a desktop folder full of recipe PDFs.
• Share and enjoy. Organize your PDF recipes however you see fit, and then share them with your friends. Email, post to social media, whatever your preferred means of online communication. All are possible now that your archives are digital.

Share recipes online with PDFs, privately.

Sharing recipes online privately using PDFs offers a secure and versatile way to exchange culinary delights with specific individuals or groups. Here’s how you can do it:

• Email. Attach recipe PDFs and send them directly to recipients.
• Cloud storage. Upload to Google Drive or Dropbox, then share links with specific access.
• Direct messaging. Share PDFs through private messaging.
• Password protection. Secure PDFs with unique passwords.
• Expire links. Set link expiration or time-limited access.
• Encrypted communication. Use secure messaging apps.
• Personal recipe blogs. Restrict access with passwords or user accounts.

Share recipes and other cherished stories with simple PDF documents. Discover what more you can do with Adobe Acrobat to convert, save, compress, merge, and send PDFs.