Category: Cookbook Design

If you have an iPhone, Apple has changed the format the camera uses to save photos on the iPhone. While this has many benefits, like taking less space for storage, it does have drawbacks, like not being compatible with non-Apple systems – like FamilyCookbookProject.com.

To switch from HEIC to JPG, you must configure the camera capture format using the iPhone’s Settings app. There are two camera capture settings that you can opt for — High Efficiency and Most Compatible. The former will shoot photos in HEIC, while the latter will shoot photos in JPG.

Here is how to change the settings in your iPhone to save image as Jpegs.

Step 1: Open the Settings app on your iPhone. Scroll down and tap on Camera. Then, tap Formats from the list of Camera settings.

Have you ever had a cake recipe that really needed a specific frosting? Or a meat recipe that required a special sauce? Wouldn’t it be great if a recipe could have sub recipes attached to keep them together?

Many of our FamilyCookbookProject.com editors have asked for the ability to have multiple sections or steps in recipes. We like to listen and have added it! Now you can have up to 5 “sub” recipes or steps within a recipe, each with its own set of ingredients and directions. Example? You have Carrot Cake and you want a section for the “Cake” with its ingredients and directions, then “Cream Cheese Frosting” with another set of ingredients and directions.

To use this feature, simply go to Add Recipe or Edit an existing recipe. First check the box for “Show subtitle and make a multi-part recipe” right under the contributor field. This will add a field for the sub-recipe title.

Using our example above, here is where you would add your carrot cake ingredients and directions.

Next, click on the green button to “Add new sub recipe”. This will add fields for a second set of sub recipe titles, ingredients and directions for your Cream Cheese Frosting.

You can add up to five sub recipes for your overall recipe.

When you are done, make sure to click on the green button on the bottom of the page to save your recipe before moving on to your next recipe.

Bill Rice is Founder and Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect, preserve and share food memories by creating their own printed personal cookbooks. He is the author of The Wellfleet Oyster Cookbook and the Cape Cod Cocktail Cookbook (Available on Amazon), both created using FamilyCookbookProject.com. He is also editor of the Donovan Family Cookbook, now it’s third printing and is an avid genealogist tracing his family back to the 1600’s.

Follow Family Cookbook Project on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest!

They say a picture is worth a thousand words and with recipes that is especially true.

It’s wonderful to read a list of ingredients and see the potential in a recipe, but to look at the finished product can make your mouth water!

Family Cookbook Project highly recommends adding a photo to every recipe you can in your online cookbook. It helps people to see what to expect when they follow your recipe and gives them a standard to meet when comparing their finished dish to the original.

With the advent of digital cameras built into cell phones, you don’t have to be a professional photographer to take good food photos.

Here are some pointers to help improve your recipe photos:

Use Natural Light – Make sure that the light is right – shoot the food either next to a bright window or under a pendant light in the restaurant. Don’t use your camera’s flash! Set your dish near a window and turn off any artificial lights that might be on nearby. Try to photograph with the light at your back or to the side of a dish, so that the shadows are to the side or behind it. 

Hold Still – Taking photos inside, even with ample natural light, often means you have to hold the camera very still to keep it from registering hand shake. If you have a tripod, that’s ideal. If you don’t, you can duplicate the tripod effect by resting your elbows on the table or counter and using them to stabilize the camera. Moving the camera when taking a photo will only lead to blurry unusable photos. 

Get close to the food! – Don’t stand back three feet and get the food with the stove, the dirty dishes, and all the condiments around it. Move in and get up close and personal, and let the pan…or the plate…or the cutting board fill the frame.  

Stage the shot – The food isn’t the only thing in the photo. Using plates, silverware and linens in complementary colors can help your dish come alive. Shoot food on a beautiful plate or on a table with texture and character. The more appetizing the ingredients, the better your photo will be. Plates that contain colored vegetables and/or meat, preferably in light-colored sauces, are often the most appealing to the eye in photos. Also Don’t be Afraid of a mess. A few crumbs or a smear of dressing can be beautiful, if you let them. 

Focus on the food –  If you are using a DSLR, stop down your lens to f/1.8 or f/2.0 that limits your depth of field to one part of the image only, blurring out everything around the subject, simulating a shot taken with a macro lens. If you are using an iPhone, there are apps, such as Camera+ or VSCO Cam, that will create the same effect. Remember, you want the food to be the main focus, not the background. 

Try different angles –  Get up over the food and shoot straight down on it. When shooting overheads, if appropriate, try filling up the frame with what’s already on the table such as cups, wine glasses, utensils and moving hands. You can also  think in three dimensions. You might not usually serve brownies piled in a vertical column, but stacking any flat food, like pancakes, cookies, or even onion rings, is a great way to show off texture and make the photo more appealing. You can also add dimension to your food photos by showing the dish right after the first bite is taken, or the second and third. These are little details that make a viewer feel like they’ve sat down and are enjoying the meal.

Get Close to Ugly Foods  – Some foods, no matter how good they taste, just don’t make good photos. But the closer you get to your subject, the more the visual story becomes about texture and color, rather than pure mouth-watering beauty. Avoid foods that are white and gloppy, such as congealed gravy on white pasty mashed potatoes. 

Size Matters –  Make sure your camera settings are set for a good sized photo. Small photos look blurry when they are enlarged online. A photo viewed online only has to be 72 dpi (dots per inch, the measure for quality), but if you are going to print your photo, you want it to be at least 300 dpi. 600 pixels wide (a measurement for size) is a good target for minimum photo size.

Using other’s photos – It is important to note that the Internet makes it easy to find photos of recipes already taken. While this might be much easier, the photo still is the property of whoever holds the rights. Don’t always assume that because a photo is on the Internet you can simply use it for your recipe. Make sure you ask permission from the owner before you use it.

Bill Rice is Founder and Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect, preserve and share food memories by creating their own printed personal cookbooks. He is the author of The Wellfleet Oyster Cookbook and the Cape Cod Cocktail Cookbook (Available on Amazon), both created using FamilyCookbookProject.com. He is also editor of the Donovan Family Cookbook, now it’s third printing and is an avid genealogist tracing his family back to the 1600’s.

Follow Family Cookbook Project on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest!

One of the questions we at FamilyCookbookProject.com get a lot is “Any way to remove blank pages that I will be charged for in printing?”

While removing a few extra pages might save you a few pennies when printing, almost all blank pages are needed. In the publishing world, certain pages need to start on the right side of a two page layout.  The Table of Contents and Category Dividers are two examples of these types of pages that always are placed on the right side of a two page layout.

If you run your preview and look at the 3D Preview, you’ll see that almost all blank pages are the end of sections to leave the new sections to start fresh.

In terms of the recipes categories, if the last page of a recipe category is blank, that page was placed there so as to have the next category starts on the right page side. However, if you add additional recipes to that first section, the blank page may come and go depending on the number of recipes in the section.

You have an option of adding a photo using the Cookbook Picture Manager or a custom page using the Custom Pages Tool to the “end” of any recipe section. That can help fill the blank page. However, if you have not finished the section and add/edit recipes, you may end up with a blank page after your photo/custom page, so wait until all of your recipes are added before considering adding any custom pages.

Another way to eliminate blank pages on the back of recipes dividers is to include our “Helpful Tip” content on the back of the dividers or to add family photos and set the location in the Photo Manager Tool to the back of the divider.

You also have the option to start the recipes on the back of the divider. This is done in the Layout and Design Center of your editors homepage. Select “Select Dividers” from the Frist Steps section and check the box for “Start recipes on divider back.” This is also where you can turn on and off “Helpful Tip”.

Bill Rice is Co-Founder and Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect, preserve and share food memories by creating their own printed personal cookbooks. He is the author of The Wellfleet Oyster Cookbook (Available on Amazon) and the Cape Cod Cocktail Cookbook, both created using FamilyCookbookProject.com. He is also editor of the Donovan Family Cookbook, now it’s third printing.

Follow Family Cookbook Project on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest!

One of the questions we at FamilyCookbookProject.com get a lot is “Any way to remove blank pages that I will be charged for in printing?”

While removing a few extra pages might save you a few pennies when printing, almost all blank pages are needed. In the publishing world, certain pages need to start on the right side of a two page layout.  The Table of Contents and Category Dividers are two examples of these types of pages that always are placed on the right side of a two page layout.

If you run your preview and look at the 3D Preview, you’ll see that almost all blank pages are the end of sections to leave the new sections to start fresh.

In terms of the recipes categories, if the last page of a recipe category is blank, that page was placed there so as to have the next category starts on the right page side. However, if you add additional recipes to that first section, the blank page may come and go depending on the number of recipes in the section.

You have an option of adding a photo using the Cookbook Picture Manager or a custom page using the Custom Pages Tool to the “end” of any recipe section. That can help fill the blank page. However, if you have not finished the section and add/edit recipes, you may end up with a blank page after your photo/custom page, so wait until all of your recipes are added before considering adding any custom pages.

Another way to eliminate blank pages on the back of recipes dividers is to include our “Helpful Tip” content on the back of the dividers or to add family photos and set the location in the Photo Manager Tool to the back of the divider.

You also have the option to start the recipes on the back of the divider. This is done in the Layout and Design Center of your editors homepage. Select “Select Dividers” from the Frist Steps section and check the box for “Start recipes on divider back.” This is also where you can turn on and off “Helpful Tip”.

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, however most people do. Family Cookbook Project announces a new, upgraded cookbook cover.  You can now select a hardcover binding that includes the name of the cookbook on the spine.

A hardcover option has been a popular request from many of our editors and you can now select that option for your cookbook under Layout & Design, Binder & Lamination Options.

A hardcover can be applied to either an 8 1/2 x 11 cookbook or our standard 8 ½ x 5 ½ cookbook. All of our existing covers are available for hardcovers as well as custom covers that the editors design.

The addition of a hardcover will impact the price of your cookbook by about six dollars per cookbook.  Shipping may be a bit higher with the added weight, too.

The hardcover binding has a page limit of 250 pages. This is usually more than enough for most cookbooks to print all of your best recipes.  Let us know what you think!

Have you ever had a cake recipe that really needed a specific frosting? Or a meat recipe that required a special sauce? Wouldn’t it be great if a a recipe could have sub recipes attached to keep them together?

Many of our editors have asked for the ability to have multiple sections or steps in recipes. We like to listen and have added it! Now you can have up to 5 “sub” recipes or steps within a recipe, each with its own set of ingredients and directions. Example? You have Carrot Cake and you want a section for the “Cake” with its ingredients and directions, then “Cream Cheese Frosting” with another set of ingredients and directions.

To use this feature, simply go to Add Recipe or Edit an existing recipe. First check the box for “Show subtitle and make a multi-part recipe” right under the contributor field. This will add a field for sub-recipe title.

Using our example above, here is where you would add your carrot cake ingredients and directions.

Next, click on the green button to “Add new sub recipe”. This will add fields for a second set of sub recipe title, ingredients and directions for your Cream Cheese Frosting.

You can add up to five sub recipes for your overall recipe.

When you are done, make sure to click on the green button on the bottom of the page to save your recipe before moving on to your next recipe.

Bill Rice is founder and Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect and share food memories through customized printed cookbooks filled with treasured recipes. Follow us on Facebook and Pinterest!