MacGourmet (recipe for disaster) and Big Sur

[rourri]

Hi!
Brand new here. Been a mac user for years. i have been using Mac Gourmet for years...and the last time i upgraded, I had issues getting to my recipes. This time it got worse...but I found a work around..ironically the day AFTER I needed my Irish Soda Bread recipe, but I do digress. I had read about the previous problem with the library not knowing where the database here on MacRumors, and it helped me get to where I needed to go. As I sorted out my own solution to this problem, I figured I would let you know what worked for me.

After upgrading to Big Sur, the "Database could not be found". Last time, I was able to point the library (under help) to the location of the database. This time, everything was greyed out...and I could not select library.

After emailing them, receiving no reply back after 2 days, and clicking on random recipes I had found on my harddrive... trying to launch the software, i clicked on the database folder...I still got the error, but this time the recipes were in the window and I was able to keep it open enough to export it all to a RTF. The database name is MacGourmet4Database.mgdatabase. It is found in the Documents folder (typically, unless you have changed it). After the pain of this SECOND upgrade screw up with MacGourmet, and the lack of resources they are apparently putting into keeping up with the Mac updates, I am going over to Paprika for future recipes. But I figured I should post this incase someone else had a problem getting in. It has allowed me to do a current export of my last weeks edits as well as my previously backed up recipes.

 

[Darth.Titan]

The website for MacGourmet doesn't list Big Sur, or even Mojave, as being compatible with their software. The most recent version of macOS their website lists as supported is Catalina.

Hopefully you have luck getting help from support, but I think I'd be shopping for different recipe management software. I like Paprika myself.

 

[NinjaHunter]

The website for MacGourmet doesn't list Big Sur, or even Mojave, as being compatible with their software. The most recent version of macOS their website lists as supported is Catalina.

Hopefully you have luck getting help from support, but I think I'd be shopping for different recipe management software. I like Paprika myself.

I am very interested in your thoughts about Paprika. I have been using Macgourmet for over a decade and just bought a Macbook Air. My son suggested I transfer the recipes to "Recipe Keeper". I really do not like Recipe Keeper. I am not interested in all the fancy options to take pictures and/or download/upload (whatever it's called), but I know that is a common option among software today. But the few things that I am really frustrated about with Recipe Keep, are probably considered pretty petty to others...
1) when the recipes transferred from MacGourmet to Recipe Keeper it changed all the measurements to funky abbreviations, i.e, slice is now "sl" and sprig is now "sp"; Tablespoon is now tb..

2) Recipe Keeper did not transfer all of my Sources

3) If I want to enter my own new recipe in Recipe Keeper I was hoping there were similar columns, like Quantities, Measurements, Descriptions, Directions.

4) Recipe Keeper did not transfer the little description or introduction I made for some of my recipes, i.e, "Everyone in the family liked this. It's a keeper!"

MacGourmet had it's hiccups for sure. But a lot of if I never used. For the purpose of using it as a family cookbook it let me do what I needed to do and it was pretty straightforward and had a cleaner look about it.

I am not happy with Recipe Keeper and would love your input on what you like about Paprika and if there are any similarities to the issues I've mentioned here. Thanks.

 

[nik_nik]

I too have been a MacGourmet and now MacGourmet Deluxe user for a decade. I absolutely love the program and use it to store all of my recipes. I stuck with it despite the various syncing issues as they promised they were working on a fix. I have tried contacting them via their Facebook page on numerous occasions, as have many other users, asking for a progress on the syncing issues. I finally give up and contacted them via Messenger. The conversation was short and sweet:

Me:
Hiya, what is happening with MacGourmet Deluxe? Are we likely to see a new version soon with the syncing issues resolved? Are you even supporting this software any more? I absolutely love MacGourmet Deluxe, but if it is no longer being supported, I will start looking for an alternative to use. Any information you can provide about updates will be welcomed by your patient users. Thanks!

Mariner Software's reply:
Hi, you might want to look for an alternative. The software isn't under maintenance at this time.

So now we know - Mariner seem to have abandoned a once great piece of software 😩.

 

[dkawano]

For all of you that have loved MacGourmet and have run into problems + possibly hours in trying to debug/emailing them etc. Let me just say, I bit the $ bullet and switched to Paprika. Within about 15 minutes, I easily exported all of my recipes from MacGourmet, imported them all to Paprika, added a few recipe favorites from some websites and sync'd my phone.

I can't believe how much time I have spent in worrying that I would lose all of my family/favorite recipes, fussing with MacGourmet for years.

If you have doubts about the $ of Paprika or concerns about the transition, let me just say I am impressed with the quick response time of the download and sync process, as well as, the ease of use of Paprika. Both signs of well written, clean coding in my humble opinion.

 

[HDFan]

MacGourmet was a great program with great support. Then Mariner Software purchased it. Don't know why they did it because they never supported it. They did try to implement a synching feature, but it never worked and they never fixed it. Mariner is still selling the software which doesn't work and isn't supported. Certainly a company to stay away from.

Paprika works just great as a substitute.

I easily exported all of my recipes from MacGourmet,

How did you do that? I have almost 3K reciples in MacGourmet. Actually, I have maybe a few hundred recipes but their synch service bug duplicated recipes so I have 2, 3, 4 copies of a lot of my recipes.

 

[dkawano]

To move recipes from MacGourmet to Paprika. Go to MacGourmet, in "Library" select "Recipes", go to the app menu and select "Edit", "Select All" to select all of your recipes then go to the app menu and select "File", "Export". This will create an export file of all of your recipes (save the file with name like "myrecipes" so you can upload it into Paprika".

Then open your Paprika app and from the app menu select "File", "Import". The program will ask which file where you can select the exported file (myrecipes) of all of your recipes.The Paprika app will download all of your recipes.

Here are 2 links in case my instructions are difficult to follow:
How to create an export file from MacGourmet.
How to import a file to Paprika.

 

[suzannestephenson]

To move recipes from MacGourmet to Paprika. Go to MacGourmet, in "Library" select "Recipes", go to the app menu and select "Edit", "Select All" to select all of your recipes then go to the app menu and select "File", "Export". This will create an export file of all of your recipes (save the file with name like "myrecipes" so you can upload it into Paprika".

Then open your Paprika app and from the app menu select "File", "Import". The program will ask which file where you can select the exported file (myrecipes) of all of your recipes.The Paprika app will download all of your recipes.

Here are 2 links in case my instructions are difficult to follow:
How to create an export file from MacGourmet.
How to import a file to Paprika.

Can I just ask what format you chose for your Export from MacGourmet? After reading the depressing post above I am going to switch to Paprika.

 

[suzannestephenson]

Also, does anyone know if there are plug-ins for Paprika? MacGourmet used to link to the USDA Nutrition database so you could calculate the nutrition info for any recipe. That would be annoying and painful to have to do manually.

 

[cckborg]

I, too, finally grew tired of several years of "we expect to release an update for MGD this year." I bought Paprika during their annual Black Friday sale. Importing was a breeze, at first glance. However, I ran into a number of issues of lost information.

1. Only Categories transferred. The special fields of Course, Cuisine, Prepared, Keywords, Equipment did not. I created new categories for those fields in MGD and assigned them manually. (Note, you cannot make batch changes for individual categories in MGD so be careful.)
2. For Times, Paprika only has Cook, Prep, and Total times. (I would like to see at minimum a "Inactive" Time to cover marinating, cooling, resting, etc.). Importing assigns Active, Bake, Beat, Chill to Cook time; Start to Finish, Total Time, and Ready In to Total Time; Prep to Prep Time. It ignores all the other times I had used. Paprika does highlight times it detects in instructions, so that helps.
3. The "Info" field in MGD maps to "Source URL" in Paprika. I had used that field for lots of things in addition to URLs. I manually changed that.
4. MGD Yield field does not transfer. (Servings does.) Some recipes are more suited to a yield than servings. I manually moved the Yield info into directions. (In retrospect Notes might have been a better place.
5. Paprika does not number steps in directions. (Some people like numbered steps, others don't).
6. All recipes in MGD with no assigned difficulty level are labeled "Easy" in Paprika. I don't know if that is an export or an import issue. MGD has 5 levels of difficulty in addition to not assigned. 1&2 map to "Easy"; 3&4 map to "Medium" and 5 maps to Hard.
7. Rating in MGD does not transfer. (Again, I don't know if that is an export or import issue.)
8. If you referenced sub-recipes in MGD, that info did not transfer. I had to manually go into the recipe in Paprika and re-assign. It was as simple as adding [recipe:" and "]" around the ingredient/recipe name. Example: Replace "Garlic Aioli" with "[recipe:Garlic Aioli]". It becomes a clickable link that brings up the sub-recipe.

Limitations I have observed in Paprika: (I am still new to it, so I may not have discovered how to do these things.)
1. You can't make batch changes to recipes other than selecting and dragging into a category folder.
2. I have to open a recipe, click the "sidebar" icon, to get my list of recipes so I can view recipe list and selected recipe content at the same time (and move easily from recipe to recipe).
3. There is no nutrition information or calculation.
4. As far as I can tell, grocery lists & emailing/exporting recipes does not drill down to include sub-recipes.

I have not used Paprika enough yet to extol its virtues. It will take a while to get used to its interface and learn its true power.

I became painfully aware of how buggy and quirky MGD has become as I worked to remedy all of the above. It was a good reminder that its useful days are limited and I had to face the pain of transition sooner or later.

 

[cckborg]

I, too, finally grew tired of several years of "we expect to release an update for MGD this year." I bought Paprika during their annual Black Friday sale. Importing was a breeze, at first glance. However, I ran into a number of issues of lost information.

1. Only Categories transferred. The special fields of Course, Cuisine, Prepared, Keywords, Equipment did not. I created new categories for those fields in MGD and assigned them manually. (Note, you cannot make batch changes for individual categories in MGD so be careful.)
2. For Times, Paprika only has Cook, Prep, and Total times. (I would like to see at minimum a "Inactive" Time to cover marinating, cooling, resting, etc.). Importing assigns Active, Bake, Beat, Chill to Cook time; Start to Finish, Total Time, and Ready In to Total Time; Prep to Prep Time. It ignores all the other times I had used. Paprika does highlight times it detects in instructions, so that helps.
3. The "Info" field in MGD maps to "Source URL" in Paprika. I had used that field for lots of things in addition to URLs. I manually changed that.
4. MGD Yield field does not transfer. (Servings does.) Some recipes are more suited to a yield than servings. I manually moved the Yield info into directions. (In retrospect Notes might have been a better place.
5. Paprika does not number steps in directions. (Some people like numbered steps, others don't).
6. All recipes in MGD with no assigned difficulty level are labeled "Easy" in Paprika. I don't know if that is an export or an import issue. MGD has 5 levels of difficulty in addition to not assigned. 1&2 map to "Easy"; 3&4 map to "Medium" and 5 maps to Hard.
7. Rating in MGD does not transfer. (Again, I don't know if that is an export or import issue.)
8. If you referenced sub-recipes in MGD, that info did not transfer. I had to manually go into the recipe in Paprika and re-assign. It was as simple as adding [recipe:" and "]" around the ingredient/recipe name. Example: Replace "Garlic Aioli" with "[recipe:Garlic Aioli]". It becomes a clickable link that brings up the sub-recipe.

Limitations I have observed in Paprika: (I am still new to it, so I may not have discovered how to do these things.)
1. You can't make batch changes to recipes other than selecting and dragging into a category folder.
2. I have to open a recipe, click the "sidebar" icon, to get my list of recipes so I can view recipe list and selected recipe content at the same time (and move easily from recipe to recipe).
3. There is no nutrition information or calculation.
4. As far as I can tell, grocery lists & emailing/exporting recipes does not drill down to include sub-recipes.

I have not used Paprika enough yet to extol its virtues. It will take a while to get used to its interface and learn its true power.

I became painfully aware of how buggy and quirky MGD has become as I worked to remedy all of the above. It was a good reminder that its useful days are limited and I had to face the pain of transition sooner or later.

I forgot to add that Cooking Notes, Shopping Lists, Wine, Beer, Cheese content from MGD does not export. Nor do any Clippings that have not been fully imported.

 

[mk313]

Question for those of you that use Paprika, is there a way to easily import recipes that you have on paper or PDF? I looked at the user Guide online & don't see anything that talks about that at all. Seems like an interesting app. I tried some recipe apps years ago, but never really took to them. This was before the iPad though, so it involved putting my laptop in the kitchen which wasn't quite as simple as the iPad. I might want to give this another try.

 

[ignatius345]

Question for those of you that use Paprika, is there a way to easily import recipes that you have on paper or PDF? I looked at the user Guide online & don't see anything that talks about that at all. Seems like an interesting app. I tried some recipe apps years ago, but never really took to them. This was before the iPad though, so it involved putting my laptop in the kitchen which wasn't quite as simple as the iPad. I might want to give this another try.

Paprika's brilliant at importing off of websites, but I don't know if it has any way to bring in a recipe off of a PDF.

At the very least, you might try copying and pasting the info from the PDF into the Mac app. If it's something that exists only on paper that might entail some typing -- or maybe you can scan it in and see if the Mac will recognize the text and let you copy it.

 

[mk313]

Paprika's brilliant at importing off of websites, but I don't know if it has any way to bring in a recipe off of a PDF.

At the very least, you might try copying and pasting the info from the PDF into the Mac app. If it's something that exists only on paper that might entail some typing -- or maybe you can scan it in and see if the Mac will recognize the text and let you copy it.

Thank you. I didn’t see anything with regards to importing those types of recipes and it sounds like it’s not designed to do that. Appreciate the reply.

 

[Pomeroy]

Question for those of you that use Paprika, is there a way to easily import recipes that you have on paper or PDF? I looked at the user Guide online & don't see anything that talks about that at all. Seems like an interesting app. I tried some recipe apps years ago, but never really took to them. This was before the iPad though, so it involved putting my laptop in the kitchen which wasn't quite as simple as the iPad. I might want to give this another try.

You can copy and paste from a PDF if it has editable text and not just a picture of text. That works good. If it is just a picture or a Handwritten note you can Scan it in the try a OCR app like Textify. Once it is scanned in and run thru an OCR app you can copy and paste it into Paprika. Paprika has a lot of food web sites in it and you can search for a recipe similar to what you want and it will import it and you can make some changes to get what you want.

 

[Weaselboy]

Question for those of you that use Paprika, is there a way to easily import recipes that you have on paper or PDF?

You can cut and paste as other mentioned.

I use Paprika and was curious about importing a PDF. From what I can tell there is no direct way, but I found the below work around on Reddit if that helps you.

Hmmmm....here are the steps I took: Load the doc to Google Drive. Go to the Google Drive website (I used Chrome, doubt that makes a difference though), double click the doc you want to open it, click the 3 dots in the upper right and select 'share' change to 'anyone with the link'; copy the link and paste the link in the Paprika browser. Worked for me without issue just now. Only question I have is are you on Paprika 3? I am running v3.2.2.

 

[mk313]

You can cut and paste as other mentioned.

I use Paprika and was curious about importing a PDF. From what I can tell there is no direct way, but I found the below work around on Reddit if that helps you.

Thanks for the google docs tip. That sounds like it might work. Even if it only does half my recipes, it would still be a great help. I’ll give it a shot.

Thanks for taking the time to share

 

[Weaselboy]

Paprika can import HTML recipes on web pages, so I think the work around is just allowing Paprika to see the PDF as a HTML web page. Good luck.

 

[ignatius345]

Paprika can import HTML recipes on web pages, so I think the work around is just allowing Paprika to see the PDF as a HTML web page. Good luck.

This probably wouldn't work for this PDF workflow, but I use Simplenote in a similar way: you can paste in text and quickly publish the document to a web link, which can then be used elsewhere. I use it with Pocket to get stuff like long emails or Word docs onto my ereader (which imports Pocket articles).

 

[DZGB]

Hi All. Thank you for the conversation and insight. I’m a Newbie who like you all, frustrated with being “discarded” by Mariner Software, realized I need to do Something with my decade-plus recipe database to make it usable and accessible (from other devices) again. I’ve even considered having a FedEx Office or the like print my content to a binder (which I may not discount just yet). Yes, felt panicked over the possibility of losing everything I built in MacGourmet4.
After reading though this string I feel confident that I can migrate all to Paprika and, with a bit of manual effort and tweaking, get something functional up and running again.

 

[WayneH1]

Looks like I may need to move on as well but for the record the path to your database is in a file at:

user/Library/Preferences/com.marinersoftware.MacGourmet.plist

You can edit the plist entry (with the app not running of course) to any path you like. I used Xcode but I think there are many other tools you can use, maybe even TextEdit.

FWIW, the app appears to be running OK for me in Monterrey 12.2.1 although I haven't done much with it yet. Just got a new MacBook and I'm still migrating.

 

[sommls]

Not that more should be needed, but there continue to be better reasons for migrating to a MacGourmet alternative.

For me, Ventura didn't seem to have changed much in terms of function. However, Dropbox's revision late last year to different default HD locations still further degraded the usefulness of the recipe program; chasing default locations for the MG database was just the last straw.

It's really too bad, because the older program's interface options are still superior to those of Paprika 3, to which I migrated several hundred recipes with fairly minimal pain.

Sadly, being able to import recipes to Paprika from a wide variety of sources and its relative stability are just too great a relief for me to even contemplate going back. This from someone who used MG happily for more than 10 years.

 

[yeti]

Hi everybody. I just wanted to chime in to talk about another alternative to MGD: Mela. It is a modern recipe manager that imports perfectly from web pages and RSS feeds. After being fed up with MacGourmet Deluxe 4.3.2 and no new updates I started looking for an alternative. I read this thread and many others and most of them talked about Paprika… but while researching for several options I came across Mela.

Being made by Silvio Rizzi, the maker of my beloved and favorite RSS reader since its version 1.0, called Reeder, I had to try it… and I wasn't wrong. I really like it and I have already migrated all my family's recipe books to Mela. The only inconvenience is that it doesn't import from MacGourmet Deluxe directly.

I haven't used Paprika, but I wanted to give another option for those in search of a MacGourmet Deluxe substitute.

Cheers