Never lose a recipe

The 72-hour problem nobody mentions

TikTok, Instagram and Facebook do not serve their thumbnails from ordinary addresses. They use signed links that expire on their own schedule, often within 24 to 72 hours. That is a sensible thing for them to do and a disaster for anyone who saved the link instead of the picture.

It is why a recipe you bookmarked last week already looks broken — a row of grey rectangles where the food was — while the original post sits there, perfectly fine, still public. Nothing was deleted. The link just stopped being valid.

Shallot fetches the actual image when you save. Not the link — the picture. When that works, your copy is unaffected by anything that happens to the post afterwards, because it was never depending on theirs.

It does not always work. The platform can refuse the request, the file can be too large, our storage can be briefly unavailable. When any of that happens the save keeps the original link rather than failing — you still get the recipe, and that particular picture will still expire on the platform’s schedule. We do not currently show you which of the two you got, which is a gap worth naming rather than glossing.

What people actually lose

Not the recipe. Recipes are findable — some version of almost anything is a search away, and if the ingredients are gone you can usually reconstruct them.

What goes for good is the margin. Whose it was. That you doubled the garlic and it was better. That it is the one you make when someone is sad. Six hours, start it before church, the milk at the end is the whole trick. That part was never published anywhere, so no search recovers it — which is why it is stored as yours from the moment you write it.

Exactly what survives, and what does not

• Kept

  The title, ingredients and steps

  Stored when you save, as text in your cookbook. They do not depend on the original page still existing, or on you being online.

• Kept

  Anything you wrote

  Your notes, tags, collections and favourites. This is the part that exists nowhere else in the world, and the part people are actually grieving when they say they lost a recipe.

• Kept

  Photos from TikTok, Instagram and Facebook — usually

  Copied to our own storage at the moment you save, because those links expire on their own schedule. If that copy cannot be made, the save falls back to the original link and that picture will expire like any other. See above — this is the interesting one.

• Kept

  The link back to where it came from

  Kept as provenance and always shown. Credit for a recipe belongs to whoever made it, and a save should be able to point at them.

• Not kept

  Photos from websites, YouTube and Pinterest

  Still pointing at the source, because those links are stable rather than expiring. If a site takes its page down, that picture can go with it. We would rather tell you that than imply a guarantee we have not built.

• Not kept

  The original page itself

  Not ours to keep. A save is a record of a recipe, not a mirror of somebody's website — we do not republish the source's own writing.

A recipe we could only half-read is still a recipe

Plenty of recipes are not written down properly in the first place. A video with the ingredients in the caption and the method only in the footage. A post that is mostly a story. Shallot saves what it found and tells you which of three things you have: a full recipe, a partial one, or a bookmark with the link, title and photo.

None of those is treated as a failure, and nothing is thrown away for being incomplete. A link and a note is a perfectly good way to keep a recipe — it is how most of them survived before any of this existed.

What we are not promising

We do not keep a copy of the source’s page, and we do not republish anyone’s writing. A save is a record of a recipe, not a mirror of a website.

And the image copying above is best effort on three platforms, not a guarantee on all of them. For a food blog, a YouTube video or a Pinterest pin the photo still points at the source, because those addresses are stable — so if that site goes down, the picture may go with it. Even on the three where we do copy, a fetch that fails leaves the original link in place. The text, the steps and everything you wrote are unaffected in every one of those cases, which is the promise we can actually make.