Import a Recipe Exactly as Written: From a Cookbook Photo or a Link

Some recipes aren't meant to be improved. Your grandmother's stew, the one from the cookbook you've had since university, the one a friend sent you last week. You don't want the ingredients swapped or the portions nudged to fit a macro target. You just want it saved, with real nutrition attached, exactly the way it was written.

That's a different job from generating a recipe, so it lives on a different screen. Import a Recipe (under Library) reads a source (a photo or a link), and transcribes it. Nothing is substituted, nothing is rebalanced. "Nothing is swapped or rebalanced" is the app's own description of what it does, not marketing language layered on top.

Not the same as the AI Recipe Generator

If you've read about Lecker's four ways to start a recipe (Describe, Snap or scan, Paste a link, Surprise me) this is easy to mix up with that "Paste a link" option, because both start with a URL. The difference is what happens next.

Same starting point (a link, or a photo) two different outcomes. If you want Lecker to adjust a dish to fit your goals, that's Create Recipe. If you want the dish preserved and just need the nutrition worked out, that's Import a Recipe.

From a photo: up to 4 shots of the same recipe

Snap the page (a cookbook, a magazine, or a printout), and Lecker reads the ingredients, amounts, and method straight off it. A single page usually isn't enough for a full recipe, so you can add up to 4 photos of the same recipe (the intro, the ingredient list, and the method often span more than one page) before it reads them together.

Clean, printed text reads most reliably. Handwriting can work too, but it's a harder read for any transcription tool, printed or digital. If a card comes back with a gap or a guessed amount, the review step below is exactly where to catch and fix it before saving.

From the internet: including Instagram and TikTok

Paste a link and Lecker reads the recipe exactly as the page publishes it. No rebalancing, no substitutions. For most recipe sites and blogs, that means reading the page's own recipe data directly.

Instagram and TikTok don't publish a readable recipe in their posts the way a blog does, so those links are handled differently: Lecker reads the caption and the cover photo instead of trying to scrape a page that has nothing to scrape. If a link doesn't have a machine-readable recipe on it at all, Import a Recipe falls back to reading the page as text, and if even that comes up empty, it'll suggest snapping a photo of the recipe instead, so a stubborn link never becomes a dead end.

Check it before you save

Nothing saves automatically. Once a photo or link is read, you get a review card: title, ingredients with amounts, method, and a servings count. If the source didn't state how many servings it makes, Lecker assumes 4 and flags it clearly so you can correct it. The per-serving nutrition updates instantly when you do.

Change it later, without losing "exact"

Once it's saved, an imported recipe isn't frozen. Open it and you can still adjust it (remove an ingredient, change an amount, add something), and choose how that change is handled: apply it exactly as edited, with nothing else touched, or let Lecker rebalance the whole recipe to a calorie target or an eating style the way it would for a generated recipe. Exact stays exact until you decide otherwise; adjusting it is always your call, not an automatic one.

That second option is where this connects back to the rest of Lecker: if you decide a recipe you imported as-is should actually fit your macros, rebalancing it works the same way it does for anything the AI generates, against the same Balanced, High Protein, Lower Carb, or Custom bands.

Import keeps a recipe honest to its source. Rebalance is there for the day you decide it shouldn't be.

Not every recipe worth keeping needs to be reinvented. Snap the page, paste the link, or pull it from Instagram or TikTok. Import a Recipe keeps it exactly as written, with the nutrition worked out for you, until and unless you decide to change it.