Prepful
The by-hand method
Works with a notes app, a spreadsheet, or a binder.
Pick one home for every recipe: a notes app, a spreadsheet, a binder, or a recipe app.
Gather what you have from Instagram Saved, TikTok Favorites, screenshots, browser bookmarks, and paper cards. Move only the recipes you would really cook.
Keep the whole recipe, not just a link: the ingredients, the steps, and a link back to the creator.
Sort by how you choose dinner: meal type, cuisine, and a quick group for 30 minutes or less. Keep the groups few.
Keep recipes you want to try apart from ones you have cooked and liked.
Once a week, pick a few dinners from the collection, put them on days, and write the shopping list.
Where your recipes are hiding
Most people have more saved recipes than they think, spread over five or six places. Go through each one once:
- Instagram: your Saved folder, including any collections you made there.
- TikTok: your Favorites, plus any videos you liked meaning to come back to.
- Your camera roll: screenshots of recipe posts and recipe cards.
- Your browser: bookmarks and open tabs of recipe sites.
- Paper: handwritten cards, printouts, and the cookbooks you actually open.
Be strict as you go. If you would not cook it in the next few months, leave it where it is. A collection of 40 recipes you want to make is more useful than 400 you scroll past.
Why a link is not enough
A saved post depends on someone else keeping it up. Posts get deleted, accounts go private, captions get edited, and apps shut down. Mealime, a popular meal planning app, shut down on October 21, 2026, and its users' saved data went with it. So keep the ingredients and steps themselves, and keep the link next to them so you can find the creator again.
Groups that help you pick dinner
The best way to sort recipes is the way you decide what to cook. For most people that means:
- Meal type: breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, snacks.
- Cuisine: Italian, Mexican, Thai, and so on, so you can match a craving.
- Quick: 30 minutes or less, for weeknights.
- To try vs. tried and loved: so proven favorites don't get buried under new saves.
- A few of your own: "Sunday batch cook", "kid-approved", "for guests".
Stop there. Thirty folders take more work to keep up than they save, and a recipe that could live in four of them ends up in none.
The faster way: let an app do the copying
Prepful is a free app that saves recipes from links and photos, and sorts them for you.
Share or paste a link from TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or any recipe website, or take a photo of a card or cookbook page. Prepful pulls out the ingredients and steps.
Imported links get a cuisine and meal type on the way in, so you can browse by Cuisine or Meal type without tagging anything yourself.
Heart your favorites and make your own collections, like "Sunday batch cook". Search your saved recipes by name or cuisine.
Quick & easy shows everything ready in 30 minutes or less, Favorites keeps the ones you love one tap away, and Imported lists everything you saved from a link or photo.
Tap Add to Plan to put a recipe on a day, and the week's shopping list builds itself.
Each recipe saved from a link keeps a link back to the original post or site, so the creator is one tap away.
Ready to start? See how to save from Instagram, TikTok, any website, or a photo. Once your recipes are in one place, plan the week from them and turn that week into one grocery list. And if you have a collection but still never cook from it, read why you never cook the recipes you save.