Get a recipe out of a Pinterest pin
To get a recipe out of a Pinterest pin and into a recipe app, you paste the pin’s URL and let the app follow the pin’s outbound link to the page that actually holds the recipe. That is exactly how Cookfolio works: it opens the pin, finds the destination of the “Visit” button, and reads that page. One consequence is worth knowing before you start: a pin with no outbound link, or with a dead one, cannot be imported at all.
A pin is an image plus a link, not a recipe
A Pinterest pin does not contain a recipe. It contains a photo, a title, a short description, and an outbound link: the “Visit” button that leads to the page where the recipe actually lives. Everything else is presentation.
That is why the pattern breaks down at exactly the wrong moment. You pin something for later, the board grows, and one Tuesday evening you want to cook it: reopen Pinterest, find the pin, tap through, wait for the blog, scroll past the ads and the childhood memories before the ingredients appear. The recipe was never in the pin.
Time makes it worse. A board of several hundred pins collected over five or six years contains dead links by simple arithmetic: blogs shut down, articles get deleted, sites change their URL structure. It also contains decorative pins with nothing behind them.
None of this is a complaint about Pinterest, which is very good at discovering ideas. It was never meant to be what you hold in your hand while cooking. Hence the rule for this article: importing a pin means going back to its source, not reading the pin.
How the import actually works
In the app the path is short: open Cookfolio, tap ”+” to create a recipe, choose import from a link, paste the pin URL, read what comes back, save.
Accepted URL formats: pinterest.com and its country variants (pinterest.fr, pinterest.co.uk, pinterest.de), the mobile subdomains (m.pinterest.*), and pin.it short links, which are resolved to their full pinterest.com address before anything else happens.
What happens behind that explains every success and failure. The app opens the pin page, finds the source address (the destination of the “Visit” button), then runs on it exactly the same treatment as a normal web link import. On the source page it first reads the structured recipe data most cooking sites publish in their code, and falls back on AI reading the page text only when that data is missing or unusable. Meanwhile the app says what it is doing (“Opening the pin’s source”). It takes a few seconds: there is no video to analyse.
Two precisions. The app never reads the pin image or its description, only the link. And nothing is saved on its own: the extraction is always shown on a review screen first, for you to correct before it becomes a recipe.
The pins that will not import, and why
Three failure cases, worth naming plainly.
The pin has no outbound link. An image uploaded natively to Pinterest, with no site behind it. Nothing to follow, so the app fails with a clear message instead of inventing plausible ingredients: a clean refusal beats an approximate recipe you find out is wrong halfway through cooking.
The link is dead. The pin points at a site, but the page is gone: blog closed, article removed, URL structure changed. The app cannot reach it and says so (“Could not reach the page. Check the link or try again later”). On old pins this is by far the most common outcome.
The link goes somewhere that is not a single recipe. A blog homepage, a roundup post such as “30 dessert ideas”, or content behind a mandatory login: there is no single recipe to extract. Pasting a board or profile URL does not work either, the import handles one pin at a time.
When a pin fails, the app suggests fallbacks on screen: find the original recipe elsewhere and paste its link, screenshot it and import as a photo, or copy and paste the recipe text.
Sort the board as you import, not before
There is no bulk import for a Pinterest board, and honestly that is for the best. Pushing 300 pins into an app gives you an app exactly as cluttered as the board: you would have moved the mess, not solved it.
A method that works: open the board and apply one blunt filter, would you actually cook this in the next month? Not “is it beautiful”, not “might it be useful one day”. Most boards yield 10 to 20 pins out of several hundred, and those are worth ten minutes of your evening.
A shortcut for sorting quickly: tap the pin. If it opens a real cooking site, it is importable. If it stays inside Pinterest, it is not. You can triage a board faster that way than by reading the titles.
Technical limits point the same way: roughly 5 seconds are required between two imports, and the ceiling is 100 imports per day. Bulk import does exist in Cookfolio, but only for collections exported from Paprika (.paprikarecipes) or Mela (.melarecipes), and only on paid plans. It is not a back door for Pinterest.
Twenty recipes you cook beats three hundred pins you never reopen, and how you organise what you keep matters more than its size.
What you end up with
The recipe arrives structured: title, description, ingredients, steps, prep and cook times, servings, suggested tags. The review screen is where you tidy it up, dropping a stray ingredient the page had in a sidebar or splitting a step that came through glued to the next one.
The photo saved with the recipe comes from the original recipe page, not from the pin image, and it is re-encoded and resized (up to 1200 pixels) before being stored.
After that it behaves like any other recipe. Change the servings and quantities are recalculated proportionally, rounded to 0.1, while an ingredient with no numeric quantity (“a pinch of salt”) is left untouched. Unit conversion works between units of the same kind only, volume to volume or weight to weight: cups to grams is not something the app does, since that ratio depends on the ingredient’s density.
The recipe can then go into the weekly plan, Monday to Sunday, where planned meals generate a shopping list with duplicates merged automatically. When you cook, full-screen cooking mode keeps the screen awake and turns timings written in the steps into tappable timers.
Plans, import credits, and what a failed pin costs
Free gives you 5 recipes and 5 AI imports for life, all sources combined. A Pinterest import spends a credit exactly like a photo or a video, even though technically it comes down to reading a web page. There is no free source.
The reassuring part: the credit is counted on success only. A pin with no outbound link, or with a dead one, does not cost you one of your 5 free imports, you simply wait a few seconds before trying the next one. Same rule for every other AI import.
Pro is 4.99 € per month or 39.99 € per year, with unlimited recipes and imports. Family is 6.99 € per month or 59.99 € per year for up to 4 accounts sharing recipes, planner and shopping list in real time, each person keeping their own login: useful when several people in your household pin on their own side.
Cookfolio runs on web, iOS and Android in six languages (French, English, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish), recipes are shared as a web link, and there is no offline mode, so a connection is required. Five well chosen pins is enough to judge the method.