How do I organize my recipes by category?

You finally got everything into one place. A hundred and twenty recipes imported, the camera roll emptied, your mother’s index cards photographed. And what you have now is one long list you have to scroll through to find “the chicken one”, the Sunday one, not the other one.

In most tools, filing recipes is decoration: you create folders, you drag recipes into them, and nothing happens afterwards. Filing in Origano has a different job. It decides what lands on your plate on Thursday.

Breakfast, dessert, vegetarian: these are not the same thing

The question almost always arrives like that, with all three words in one sentence. They are three different levels, and mixing up the first two is exactly what makes filing pointless.

• The recipe book is the big box, and above all the sharing boundary: a book opens up to somebody whole or not at all. “Family” for the one your partner sees, “High protein” for the one you keep to yourself. One of your recipes lives in a single book at a time, and moves to another one in two clicks.
• The meal type is breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert or snack. Five values, the same ones for everybody, ticked on the recipe. It is the only field the menu generator reads.
• The category is the label you invent: “vegetarian”, “nut free”, “under 30 minutes”, “mother-in-law’s”, “summer”. Create as many as you want, put several on one recipe, or none at all.

In other words: “dessert” is a meal type, “vegetarian” is a category, and the difference matters. A cake marked as a dessert will never be offered as Tuesday’s dinner. A recipe labelled vegetarian will be, because you are the one who decides what that word means, not the application.

Several of them exist, and they are not alike

Labelling recipes is nothing exotic and almost every manager can do it. Paprika is probably the most polished on this ground, with a decade of refinement behind it, but it is sold per platform as a one-time purchase (about $5 on mobile, $30 on desktop), with no web version and no way to share with a second person. Plan to Eat is excellent at planning, with a calendar where you drag each recipe into place yourself, but it has no permanent free plan, at roughly $49 a year. Samsung Food, formerly Whisk, is free and very complete, but carries advertising.

So the difference is not being able to label. It is what happens next:

• Filing feeds the generator. You choose which books Origano is allowed to draw from, and it fills the week out of those.
• Nothing to sync. One copy, on the server, the same one on the phone in the kitchen and on the computer at work.
• The categories are yours. No imposed list, no taxonomy to learn, no “diet” field with twelve checkboxes in it.
• No advertising, on either plan.

A detailed comparison against the six main competitors lives on the alternatives page.

How to file your recipes without losing an evening

1. Make few books, and make them for somebody

The rule of thumb fits in one sentence: one book per big bucket or per sharing boundary, everything else in categories.

What justifies a book is not what the recipes are about, it is who gets to see them. “Family” is shared with your partner and holds the dinners everybody eats. “High protein” is shared with nobody and holds your post-workout lunches. Two books, because two audiences. A third one for the cottage, open to the friends who come up for the weekend, follows exactly the same logic.

Inside “Family”, on the other hand, “quick”, “vegetarian” and “kids approved” need no book of their own: those are categories. And “desserts” needs one even less, since that is already a meal type. This is where the common mistake lives: fifteen thematic books for two hundred recipes, and nobody knows which one to look in any more.

Sharing a book is a Pro feature, but the boundary is worth drawing right away: a book created today for yourself alone is a book you can open up to somebody later without moving a single recipe. Books reorder by drag and drop, so the one you use most ends up first.

And if you share nothing at all, one single book is a perfectly good answer, with all the filing done by categories. So is the opposite: several books and not one category. What follows is a rule of thumb, not a method to follow. There is no wrong way to use the application, only the one that gets you back to your recipes.

2. Tick the meal type

It takes thirty seconds a recipe, and it is what makes the generator usable. An imported recipe usually arrives with its type already guessed; what is left is fixing the ambiguous ones, the soup that is lunch at your place and dinner at somebody else’s. A recipe can carry several: Sunday’s chili is a dinner and Monday’s lunch.

3. Create categories the moment you need one

Do not start by drawing up the perfect list. Open a recipe, type the word into the categories field, and if it does not exist yet it is created on the spot. You will never have an unused category, because every one of them was born out of a recipe that needed it.

The categories that actually earn their keep describe a constraint, not a theme. “Vegetarian”, “nut free”, “under 30 minutes” and “kids approved” are words you will use at 5 pm on a Wednesday. “Italian cooking”, much less. The full list is managed from your account afterwards, where you rename and delete.

4. Tell the generator where to draw from

In the menu settings, the Source tab lists your books with a checkbox each. Tick “Family”, untick “High protein”, and the household menu stops offering your post-workout chicken breasts on a Sunday night.

This is the moment filing starts paying off. The two minutes spent creating the right book are repaid every single time you click Generate.

5. Filter inside a book

At the top of every book, three filters that combine: the meal type, the category, and a search field. “Dinner” plus “vegetarian” hands you the dozen recipes to choose from when your vegetarian sister-in-law is coming over. The category filter applies to the book you are looking at, which is one more reason to keep few books, and big ones.

What the filing gives you back

You stop scrolling. The search at the top of the books page looks through the names of every recipe you own at once, yours and the ones that came from the official packs alike. The filters are for the times when you are not looking for one particular recipe, but for a recipe that meets a condition.

The week’s menu looks like you. The generator draws from the books you ticked, respects each slot’s meal type, and does not put the same recipe in the week twice.

Nothing is permanent. A recipe moves from one book to another, a category gets renamed, a whole pack is removed from a book in one action. The filing you do on Sunday is not a commitment.

If you would rather not file at all

The Pro plan adds automatic filing: on every new recipe, including the ones imported by URL or from a photo, the AI compares it against the categories you created and files it into the obvious one. When none is obvious it files nothing, because filing badly is worse than not filing. And a category you pick yourself always wins.

Pro also adds permanent book sharing, which is the whole point of the split described above: “Family” becomes the book your partner opens at their end, with the same recipes and the same labels on them, and “High protein” stays invisible to everybody but you.

What does it cost?

It is free up to 50 recipes, with no credit card, and books, meal types, categories and filters are all part of the free plan. Organizing is not a paid feature.

Beyond that, Pro is $30 USD per year, about $2.50 a month.

No advertising, on either plan.

Where to start

1. Create a free account, or open the one you have.
2. Put the fifteen recipes you actually cook into a “Family” book, then tick it in the Source tab of the menu settings.
3. Generate the week and look at the difference.

The rest can wait. Filing gets built one recipe at a time, on the day you need it, and importing your existing recipes is the first step either way.

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