How to
How to save recipes from YouTube Shorts
Shorts only. Wrap imports YouTube Shorts. It does not import full-length YouTube videos, and a normal youtube.com/watch link will be turned away with a message saying so. Better you read that here than discover it holding your phone over a mixing bowl.
The reason is honest rather than technical modesty: a forty-minute cooking video is a different problem. Its recipe is usually in the description or on the creator's site, and the parts that matter are scattered across half an hour of footage. Shorts are the format Wrap is built for — short, recipe-dense, and the one YouTube is pushing hardest.
Step by step
Open the Short and tap Share
The share arrow underneath the Short. Make sure you are on a Short and not a regular video — the URL will have
/shorts/in it.Choose Wrap
Wrap appears in the share sheet next to Messages and Mail. If it is missing, scroll to the end of the app row, tap More, and enable it.
Wait about fifteen seconds
Wrap reads the Short and assembles the recipe in the background. You can carry on scrolling; it will tell you when it is ready.
Cook from the card
A tickable ingredient list and steps you can read at arm's length, with the screen kept awake while you work.
What Wrap actually reads
- The title and description. Shorts descriptions are often where the ingredient list lives, and when it is there this is the quickest and most accurate route.
- The voiceover. Wrap transcribes the audio, which covers the very common case of a creator narrating amounts they never wrote down.
- The on-screen text. Ingredient cards and burned-in captions get read, for Shorts where the recipe only ever appears as text over the video.
When it doesn't work
- Full-length videos are not supported. This is the big one. A
youtube.com/watchlink is rejected up front rather than half-imported. If the recipe you want is in a long video, copy it out of the description manually, or find the creator's Short version if they made one. - A
youtu.belink that turns out to be long. Short share links carry no marker saying whether they point at a Short, so Wrap accepts them and checks the length once it has the video. A long one is dropped at that point, which costs you a few seconds. - Age-restricted or private videos. If YouTube will not serve the video without a login, Wrap cannot reach it.
- "Recipe on my website." Plenty of Shorts exist to drive traffic to a blog. Follow the link and share the recipe page to Wrap instead — the web importer takes any URL, though some recipe publishers block automated readers and those will fail.
- Recipes with no stated amounts. If nobody ever says how much butter, Wrap leaves it blank rather than inventing a number.
Questions
Why only Shorts?
Because that is what we can do well. Long-form cooking videos put their recipe in the description or on a linked site, and extracting one reliably from thirty minutes of footage is a different piece of engineering. We would rather turn the link away cleanly than hand you a bad recipe.
What happens if I share a full-length video anyway?
You get told immediately that only Shorts are supported. Nothing half-imported ends up in your library.
Will full YouTube videos be supported later?
Possibly, but nothing is promised and there is no date. When a page on this site says a feature exists, it exists today.
The Short has no description. Will it still work?
Usually. Wrap falls back to the voiceover and then to the on-screen text, so a Short with an empty description can still produce a full card.
Do I need to sign in to YouTube?
No. Wrap never asks for your YouTube or Google login and reads only the public Short you shared to it.