To digitize a box of recipe cards, work through it in one sitting: sort the cards into keep and maybe, photograph each keeper flat under indirect light, let an app read the photo into text, fix the two or three words it got wrong, and put the card back in the box. About three hours for two hundred cards, and the originals never leave the house.
The reason to do it in one sitting is that this project dies in batches. A card here, a card there, and six months later you have thirty done and no idea which thirty. Block an afternoon, put something on in the background, and finish.
Sort before you scan
Go through the whole box first, without a camera. Make three piles.
Keep. Recipes that have been cooked and will be again. These get photographed.
Sentimental. Recipes nobody makes anymore but that are in a handwriting you want to keep. These also get photographed, because the handwriting is the point.
No. The clipping from a 1997 magazine about a dip you have never made. Recycle it or put it back, but do not spend an afternoon digitizing recipes you would not cook.
Most boxes are about half keep. Sorting first cuts the work in half and it is the only step where you have to think.
Photograph properly, once
The quality of the photograph decides how much typing you do afterwards. Five things matter, and none of them require equipment.
Flat. Card on a table, not held in your hand. Warped cards read badly. If a card curls, weigh two corners with anything heavy.
Square on. Phone directly above the card, not at an angle. Most phones show a level indicator in the camera app when you point straight down.
Indirect light. Near a window, not in direct sun. The single biggest cause of unreadable scans is your own shadow or a hard glare across the middle of the card.
Fill the frame. Get close enough that the card fills most of the picture. Cropping later throws away the resolution the text recognition needs.
Both sides. If the method runs onto the back, photograph the back too. Everyone forgets this and finds out at the stove.
Faded ballpoint on a stained card is the hard case. Shooting in color rather than black and white helps more than you would expect, because the recognition can separate the ink from the stain by hue.
Let the text recognition do the typing
Modern phones read handwriting surprisingly well, and printed cards nearly perfectly. What you are doing is not typing the recipe, it is correcting a draft. Expect to fix a few words per card, usually the ones that are abbreviations: T and t for tablespoon and teaspoon, pkg, sm and lg, and any measurement written in a hurry.
Two things are worth correcting properly rather than leaving as they are.
The ingredient amounts. These are what let you scale the recipe later. 1 1/2 c flour is worth typing out correctly; a recipe with garbled amounts cannot be doubled for a holiday table.
The recipe name. Name it what you call it, not what the card says. You will search for “Grandma’s chili,” not “Chili con Carne (Ruth’s version).”
Everything else can stay a little rough. A method with a typo in it still cooks.
Keep what makes it a family record
Two fields are the difference between a recipe collection and a family record, and neither is on most cards.
Who it came from. Write it in even if the card does not say. You know now; in fifteen years you will not.
The photo of the original. Keep the picture of the card attached to the recipe, alongside the typed version. The typed version is what you cook from. The photograph is what somebody will want in thirty years, in the handwriting it was written in.
Then put the cards back in the box
Digitizing is not a reason to throw the cards away. Paper does one thing very well: it survives without anyone maintaining it. Keep the box, ideally somewhere that is not directly above a dishwasher, and treat the digital copy as the working version and the insurance policy at the same time.
If the box needs tidying while you have it open, the recipe box dividers and category tabs print at home, and blank recipe card templates fill the gaps where a card has gone too faint to read.
What you get on the other side
The reason to spend the afternoon is not tidiness. It is that a searchable collection does things a box cannot.
You can find a recipe by an ingredient rather than by name, which is what you actually need at 6pm with a pound of ground beef. You can scale a recipe to the number of people eating without redoing the fractions. You can plan a week from it and get the grocery list built for you. And you can hand the whole collection to a sibling as a file instead of a photocopy.
Trivet does the reading and keeps the result on your iPhone, with the photograph of the original card attached to each recipe. There is no account and no upload, and the whole collection exports to a file you keep, so the digital copy is as permanent as the box it came from.