AI Automation and Recipe Books

My Mum has a collection of recipes that she has been collecting for years. They are all shoved into a series of folders with an order that only makes sense to her. Since my brother and I moved out of home, she's been trying to find a way to share recipes with us in a way that's easy and accessible for everyone. So for Christmas last year, I decided to make her a digital cookbook.

Initial Pipeline:

Initially, the workflow was as follows: Photos of the recipes were fed into ChatGPT-4o along with a specific prompt. It would then generate a csv file with all the recipe information in it. The csv file was formatted in a way that could be easily imported into a Notion database. While this was faster than manually typing out the recipes, it still took too much time, especially considering that there were thousands of recipes, and the idea of the project was to make it as easy as possible for

my Mum to use.

Challenges:

• ChatGPT-4o could only handle ten images at a time, and struggled to handle multiple imports when creating csv files, which caused a major bottleneck.

• It also couldn't create or manipulate Notion pages. So even with ChatGPT-4o providing ingredient and process information, I still had to copy and paste it into Notion.

• This process required a very specific prompt, and even then, it wasn't totally reliable. The csv import was also far too slow to be practical for my Mum.

While I was able to create my first AI-assisted workflow, it was far from perfect.

The Solution:

After tinkering with the workflow for a while, I decided to try a different approach. Instead of using ChatGPT to handle one step of the process, I decided to use Apple's Shortcut system, Make.com, and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.6 to handle the entire process.

Make.com would use a series of steps to process any images that were added to a DropBox folder it was told to watch, use Clade to interpret the image, generate JSON files, and then import them into Notion using a specific API to create a recipe page, populate all the fields, and enter all of the ingredients, and the step-by-step process.

I then created an Apple Shortcut that would allow anyone with access to the DropBox folder to add images to it directly from their phone. The Shortcut would format the images so that Claude would be able to read them easily, and they were small enough to be processed quickly.

The Result:

Through months of testing and tweaking, I was able to send my Mum a shortcut that would allow to take a recipe (photo, screenshot, handwritten) click one button, and have it appear in her Notion database within seconds. Make.com credits were cheap enough that 1000 recipes could be processed for ~$2.00, and the process deleted the images from the DropBox folder so a free plan was sufficient.