On 21 October 2026, Mealime was turned off and the meal plans created by users were deleted. Yummly had been dark since December 2024, and the Allrecipes app had come off the stores in 2023. People who saved their favorites in time found the photos were the awkward part.
When you save a picture from a recipe blog, it will likely have a .jpg name and a WebP inside. Convertio’s webp to jpg converter takes that saved file and returns a true JPG. The conversion is done on the service’s servers, not on your laptop. The service at convertio.co takes a whole folder in one upload and returns each picture as its own JPG.
Contents: Three apps, three closures · The picture that accompanied the recipe · What the print shop takes · Converting once, at the start
Three Apps, Three Closures
Yummly started out as a recipe search engine and evolved into a recipe bookmarking site. Mealime did the same for weekly meal plans. Both sold one promise: a dish saved once would turn up on any phone with a shopping list attached. In May 2017, Whirlpool acquired Yummly, and in 2021, Albertsons Companies acquired Mealime. So there was a pretty strong argument for maintaining a recipe box within someone else’s app.
But when the owners started to consider the price of the apps, it was soon obvious that the recipe boxes were the least expensive to remove.
In the spring of 2023, the Allrecipes app was removed from the app stores, and users sought their collections on the website. By early April 2024, Whirlpool had laid off the entire Yummly team, and the app continued to operate for eight months without any support. It was announced to users that it would be discontinued on 20 December, and no bulk export was offered.
On 21 October 2026, Mealime deleted the meal plans, shopping lists and settings that its users had created.
Six days later, its front page still invited new registrations and claimed more than 4.5 million users.
The Picture That Accompanied the Recipe
The obvious answer for the photos is the browser’s Save image as. On 27 October 2026, I received a WebP for each picture I requested from Pinch of Yum, Skinnytaste, RecipeTin Eats and Sally’s Baking Addiction, each under an address ending in .jpg or .png. Smitten Kitchen, Budget Bytes and Simply Recipes sent actual JPEGs. In 12 blogs, 23 out of 48 images were returned as WebP with a JPG or PNG name.
All of those sites did nothing wrong. WebP is faster to load and uses less bandwidth for a blogger, and the browser doesn’t complain.
The WebP remains inside and renaming the file does not change anything.
That will show up years later when you go to print.
What the Print Shop Takes
A lab that prints for photographers, Bay Photo, states that they accept JPG, TIFF and PNG and prefer JPG. Vistaprint accepts BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF and HEIC for uploads, but WebP is not mentioned anywhere. Bay Photo also requests 8-bit RGB files in sRGB or Adobe RGB. A photo book created from a folder of saved photos confronts those lists one file at a time, typically on the night the gift was supposed to be completed. Later, the person who inherits the folder has no one to ask from which blog the pictures came.
Converting Once, at the Start
The fix is known as normalizing, and involves converting files to a handful of trusted formats upon receipt.
In his 2018 book on digital preservation, Trevor Owens noted that JPEG is so ubiquitous that it’s difficult to imagine it not opening.
- The story above the ingredients is not included when you save the recipe page as a PDF using the print button.
- On the day you save the photos, convert them to JPG, and you will know which dish they are for.
- Also keep the 10 recipes you actually use on paper.
Convertio takes files up to 1 GB, deletes the uploaded WebP as soon as it converts and clears the JPG off its servers within 24 hours. The picture does leave your machine for that, and JPG doesn’t have transparency, so a cut-out comes back on white.
WebP does what Google created it for in 2010. It’s a great format to receive a photo in, but not a great format to store a photo in.
| Format | Good at | My take |
|---|---|---|
| WebP | small files, fast pages | fine to receive, awkward to keep |
| JPG | photographs, printing, uploads | the format for your own copy |
| PNG | flat graphics, transparency | heavy for a photo of a dish |
In 2002, Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper discovered that new technology does not eliminate paper, but rather shifts it. That’s what recipe apps did, shifting the printing from before you cook to the week before the app closes.
The one that someone printed is often the copy that survives.
