How to get your recipes out of AnyList

AnyList's help center documents no way to export all your recipes at once. None of the articles in its recipe help topic is about exporting. What AnyList does offer is sending or printing one recipe at a time. If you have many recipes, plan on a session of repeating the same steps.

Steps

AnyList's send and print steps are written for iPhone and iPad. They mention Android only for opening a recipe someone sent you, so the menu below may differ on an Android phone.

Send one recipe

1. Open the recipe.
2. Tap Actions (the three dots).
3. Choose Email, Print & AirDrop.
4. Choose Send Recipe, AirDrop Recipe or Send Recipe Link.

• Send Recipe emails the text of the recipe, with an optional attachment meant for AnyList. See AnyList's send page.
• AirDrop Recipe works on iPhone and iPad only.
• Send Recipe Link shares a link to the original source, for recipes that have one.

Print one recipe

Open the same Actions > Email, Print & AirDrop menu and choose Print Recipe. AnyList's print page gives these two steps and nothing more. It does not mention saving as a PDF, though your device's print window may offer it.

On the web or Mac

AnyList for the Web and the Mac app are only for AnyList Complete subscribers, per AnyList's web and Mac pages. AnyList documents no export steps for either. If you are on the free plan, you have no computer route at all.

Your meal plan

This is separate from recipes. Use Actions > Email, Print, Share & Subscribe to send or print the meal plan for one week. AnyList also offers a calendar subscription link (an iCalendar .ics link) for Apple Calendar, Google Calendar and Outlook. See AnyList's meal plan page. This does not carry the recipes.

What comes out and what does not

• Send Recipe email: the text of the recipe is in the body of the email.
• The attachment: AnyList calls it a recipe file and never names its format. It is meant for AnyList, so treat the email text as the part you can use elsewhere.
• Source link: Send Recipe Link sends it. AnyList does not say whether the Send Recipe email includes it, so check one.
• Photos, notes, ratings, cooking history, nutrition: AnyList's pages do not say whether any of these are in a sent or printed recipe.
• Collections: a recipe can sit in several collections, and AnyList's help does not list collections among what a sent recipe includes. Write down which collections matter to you before you leave. See AnyList's collections page.
• Free or Complete: the send and print pages do not say whether a free account can use them.

Tips

• Cloud backup gives you no file. AnyList says your account is backed up to its servers. That restores your recipes on a new phone. See AnyList Complete.
• Shared recipes sync deletions. If you share your recipes with another person, any change syncs to both of you, including deleting recipes. Export first, and only then clean up. See AnyList's sharing page.
• Do not delete the account first. AnyList says a deleted account cannot be recovered, and the deletion page has no download step.
• Unofficial tools exist. Some scripts on GitHub log in with your AnyList email and password to copy recipes. They are not from AnyList, and this guide does not cover them.

Where to take your recipes

We checked the import pages of Paprika, Tandoor, Cook, RecipeSage, Mela and Plan to Eat. None lists AnyList as a source. AnyList itself can import a Paprika file, but the other direction has no documented path. So the options below work from what a sent or printed AnyList recipe gives you.

• Plain files. Keep each Send Recipe email in a folder, or save each printout. It costs nothing and works anywhere.
• RecipeSage says it has no AnyList importer, and suggests importing each recipe again from its original site. Its URL import takes a list of links (RecipeSage's AnyList page), and its import page lists PDFs and images too. We have not tested an AnyList printout.
• Halite has no AnyList importer and no bulk route. You can bring recipes in one at a time, as the next paragraph explains.

To use Halite, get the original website's address with Send Recipe Link and paste it into Halite. A recipe you typed in yourself has no address to use. If a site blocks Halite, Halite asks you to paste the recipe's text, and it keeps the address you tried as the recipe's source link.

As a second route, save the text of a Send Recipe email in a plain .txt file and import it with Halite's Import menu item. Many email apps save messages as .eml files, which Halite does not read. Halite reads the text with AI, labels the result as imported with AI and asks you to review it. If the recipe's source link is written in the text, Halite keeps it, along with any notes, tags and rating that appear in that recipe's part of the file. It drops anything it cannot find in the text. Halite reads about the first 60,000 characters of a file and tells you when it stopped early. Text you paste into the paste box instead arrives without a source link, unless you pasted it after a blocked web address. We have not run an AnyList recipe through either route, and we do not know whether the Send Recipe email includes the source link.

Halite does not import PDFs, and it has no importer for AnyList's attachment. A recipe brought in by its web address keeps that source and the order of its steps. Halite does not promise the original wording either way, so check each one.