# Organizing Recipes

Below are some general guidelines that were considered when creating the organization structure for recipes. 


## From The Community

> My categories are mostly based on the 'course' they belong to. Appetizers, Starters, Main course, but also sauces or beverages. When I'm looking for an idea for an every day dinner, I just browse "main course".
> 
> My tags are for picking the exact type of meal I'm looking for, based on my mood or my guests' diet, like gluten-free, vegetarian, sweet-sour or casserole. They can also act as sub-categories, like "alcohol" for beverages or "hot meal" for a main course.
> 
> User: [sephrat](https://github.com/sephrat)


## Structure 

!!! tip
    Below is a suggestion of guidelines my wife and I use for organizing our recipes within Mealie. Mealie is fairly flexible, so feel free to utilize how you'd like! 👍

In the diagram below you will see what we came up with using the new custom pages feature. The large circles indicate pages, and the rectangles indicate categories. We've grouped several 'like' categories with each other as a way to quickly find similar items. 

![Mealie Diagram](../../assets/img/mealie-diagram.webp)

## Toolbox
The toolbox gives you multiple options to clean-up and organize your recipes. You can acces it through the 'Settings' menu or through the [dashboard](../site-administration/dashboard.md).

The 'Categories' and 'Tags' tab give you the option to bulk assign categories and tags to multiple recipes. You could also remove the unused ones or title case them all.

![Toolbox-Categories](../assets/img/Toolbox-Categories.webp)

The 'Organize' tab can be used to show all of the items that do not have any category or tag assigned.

![Toolbox-Organize](../assets/img/Toolbox-Organize.webp)
