Recipes with Media Content

There is a fair amount of software these days that takes into account the fact that sometimes, people want to include a photo (or two or three or more) with their recipe. And why not? Some people are pretty proud of their creations and they want to show them off. But it goes a little deeper than that.

Professional chefs need the ability to store and share recipe photos as well. Many chefs have very specific plating techniques that they want to be able to disseminate to their cooks. It's important for those cooks to have the ability to reference those techniques even when the chef is out of the kitchen. Usually just one photo is enough, but sometimes more than one is required. If you look at some professional cookbooks, you might see various techniques displayed step by step, photo by photo.

Sometimes, somebody may want to distribute other media with the recipe. I don't see a whole lot of recipes calling for audio-only files, but I do see the occassional instructional video distributed. Sometimes it really helps to have accompanying text with the video. The video may demonstrate a lot of good things that are hard to get across on paper, but once a person has seen the video enough times, they may only be interested in the recipe itself.

Recipe software needs to account for users wanting to include media with their recipes. It would also be nice if that media was supported outside of the software's internal recipe database. A lot of people would be interested in distributing their media-laden recipes, given the opportunity.