Paprika is a lovely recipe app — but your recipes are trapped inside it. Check them out as plain text: markdown files you can read anywhere, edit in anything, and share with anyone — then push your changes back.
--- categories: [Bread] rating: 4 uid: 4C855813-25B8-41CD-96E7-… tags: [georgian, weekend-bake] ← yours; never uploaded --- # Khachapuriattachments/D2246B0B….jpgA Georgian cheese bread. ## Ingredients - 3 1/2 cup all-purpose flour - 1 tsp salt ## Substitutions Bread flour works, but 00 flour is better. ## Directions Combine the dry ingredients. Bake for 20 minutes.
One markdown file per recipe: readable in any editor, greppable, diffable, at home in a git repository, and future-proof in the way only plain text is. No database, no proprietary format — a folder of files that will still open in fifty years.
Because a recipe is just a file, sharing it is nothing special: send it, publish it, or keep a git repo with the people you cook with. They can read it, edit it, and hand it back — and none of them ever needs Paprika.
And everything you add is yours and stays put. Keep the folder in a note vault like Obsidian if you like — photos render inline, and your own tags:, aliases, and ## Substitutions section are never uploaded and never disturbed when a pull rewrites the file around them. (A --frontmatter-prefix keeps Paprika's fields politely namespaced if your vault already uses rating: for something else.)
Local edits go back to Paprika; changes made in the app come down. Both at once are merged, section by section, with git-style conflict markers only when edits genuinely overlap.
Each recipe's photo is embedded beneath its title. Add, swap, or delete that embed line and the photo is uploaded, replaced, or removed in Paprika.
A markdown file with a # Title becomes a real Paprika recipe on the next push. No forms, no app.
status shows exactly what push would do first; restore undoes anything before it's sent; deleting only ever moves to Paprika's own trash.
Plenty of tools get recipes out of Paprika as markdown. As far as I know, this is the only one that also gets your edits back in.
| Reads from | Writes | Edits go back | Photos | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| paprika-recipes | account or archive | markdown | ✓ full two-way sync | ✓ both directions |
| paprika-to-obsidian-markdown | archive | markdown | — | download only |
| paprika-to-markdown | archive | markdown | — | download only |
| paprika-exporter (bojanrajkovic) | account | markdown | — | — |
| paprika-exporter (sstarcher) | account | YAML | — | download only |
clone · pull · push · status · restore — borrowed from git on purpose, with --dry-run everywhere and --json plus meaningful exit codes when you're scripting.
Rather not hand over your password? Work entirely from the app's own .paprikarecipes exports with extract-archive and create-archive.