In this Get Organized article series, I've written before about going paperless with notes and even digitizing personal documents, like homeownership documents and medical papers, but I have yet to tackle anything in the kitchen. So that's the project at hand: digitizing a recipe collection.

A lot people keep their recipes everywhere, —strewn among old-fashioned recipe card catalogs, tattered magazines, coffee-stained cookbooks, browser bookmarks, and three different email accounts—without any centralization or sense of organization. Here, I'll show you how to take all these bits and pieces and move them to one single place where you'll always be able to find what you need.

How to Use Evernote to Digitize a Recipe Collection
After trying out a few different solutions, my favorite tool for centralizing everything is Evernote.

Evernote is a freemium note-taking and note-syncing application that you can use on a Windows PC, Mac, tablet, smartphone, or any device with a Web browser. In other words, you can store files, like typed recipes and snapshots of recipes from magazines, and then tag each one however you want. Everything you put into Evernote is searchable, even the type on PDFs.

Storage limits. While Evernote is extremely open and flexible, new users who are thinking about tackling a recipe collection should know that a free account has monthly upload limit allowance of only 60MB. That means if you start uploading a bunch of recipe PDFs to Evernote, you'll hit your quota very quickly, although the upload counter will reset after one month, so you can input more data then. A paid or Premium Evernote account (from $5 per month) extends your monthly upload limit to 1GB, which will help you upload a lot of content in one shot.

Here's an image of my Evernote screen. I'll zoom in on a few areas to talk about them in more detail.

Stacks and notebooks. Notice on the left side I have a group of files (or "stack") for "FOOD" with subsections (Evernote calls these notebooks) for "Food and Drink Photos," which mostly contains pictures wine bottles and tasting notes, "Recipes: Savory," and "Recipes: Sweet and Baking."

You'll also notice in the image I'm currently on a section called "_INBOX," which is my default location for all new notes. Any time I upload a new file to Evernote, it goes into the inbox until I have time to make sure it is properly named and tagged.

Currently, the inbox has several snapshots of handwritten recipes that I took using my iPhone. In order to burn through a bunch of them in one sitting, I didn't bother at the time to name, tag, and sort them. But that's okay because they're in the inbox, so I'll remember to do it later.

When I'm ready, I can edit the note to write the name of the recipe, add tags (baking, sweet, breakfast), and move it into the appropriate notebook.

Tags and keywords. To find a recipe, I can click on a notebook and browse what I have, or I can search for a specific tag or keyword. For example, I can navigate to the Recipes: Savory notebook and pull up all the files with the tag "vegetarian" or "chicken" or "weeknight meal." You get to decide which tags to use, and you can change them any time.

I recommend keeping your tags to only a few dozen. If your tags are too specific, they start to act more like keywords, and you can already search by keyword. Evernote even searches hand-written text in images and typed text in PDFs. So if you search for "sticky buns," the recipe shown above will appear.

Editing. One of the biggest advantages of using Evernote is that you can add more detail to your notes at any time. When you make a recipe, you can upload and attach an image to the existing note. If you want to edit a file or make additional notes about cooking times or adjustments, you can do that, too.

Sharing. You can share individual notes as well as entire notebooks in Evernote, which makes it really easy for friends and family to access your recipe collections.

Emails. We all have a smattering of recipes saved across multiple email accounts. Another bonus of using Evernote: Each Evernote user gets an @evernote.com email address, and anything you send to that address goes directly into your default notebook as a new note. Simply forward your recipes to the Evernote address and you can tag, sort, and edit them later.

Bookmarks. One element of Evernote you should really learn to love is Web Clipper, which gives you a two-click solution for moving recipes from Web pages into your Evernote account.

The Evernote Web Clipper is a free plug-in you can install on your browser. Once it's in place, just go to the Web page you want—probably from your list of bookmarked recipes—and click the Web Clipper icon. You can save the whole page, or just highlighted parts, and with many recipes, Evernote will automatically highlight just the title, ingredients list, and instructions, leaving out advertisements or photos that might take up too much space.

A Second Solution: NeatDesk
If you've read the Get Organized column before, you'll know I'm a big fan of Evernote. I'm forever amazed at what it can do. But that doesn't mean I don't try other solutions, too. For this recipe collection project, I wanted to give a desktop scanner a go. So I hooked up NeatDesk and brought to the office a folder full of recipes.

Scanning. Some recipes were hand-written on index cards or scraps of paper, and some were torn out of magazines, and most were pretty scrappy. I was impressed that NeatDesk scanned them all without ever jamming once. Each recipe just flew through the scanner and imported to the NeatDesk software program. I whizzed through about 40 recipes in 15 minutes.