My grandmother kept every recipe she ever cooked in a battered metal box, plus a stack of loose index cards and a few photocopied pages from friends. For years the plan was always "someday I'll organize all of this," and someday never came until she moved into a smaller place last spring and the box came to live on my kitchen counter instead.
The first attempt was a shared Google Doc. It worked for about a week before formatting turned into chaos, photos of handwritten cards didn't line up with the typed instructions, and nobody in the family actually wanted to read a recipe off a laptop screen anyway. What we really wanted was something that felt like an actual cookbook, something you could leave open on the counter with flour on the pages.
I ended up trying Cookbook AI after a cousin mentioned she'd used it for a similar project. You upload the PDFs, photos, or scanned cards as they are, and it keeps the original recipe text instead of rewriting it, then handles sorting everything by course and laying it out like a proper printed book. I still went back in and tweaked a few pages, the photo crops mostly, but it saved me from starting a design file from scratch.
The part that mattered most to my grandmother was that her actual handwriting-derived recipes stayed intact, nothing got "improved" or rewritten by an algorithm. We printed a handful of copies for the cousins this past holiday and it's become the thing everyone actually cooks from now instead of digging through old photos on their phones.
If anyone else has a box of family recipes sitting around waiting for a "someday" project, happy to answer questions about how the layout and printing part worked out.