Ability to convert units between metric / imperial / US imperial

[enrauk]

First Check

• I used the GitHub search to find a similar requests and didn't find it.
• Checked the tasks tagged issues and verified my feature is not covered

Please provide a concise description of the problem that would be addressed by this feature.

Allow users to toggle between metric / imperial / US imperial units for a recipe and automatically convert the units to the chosen system. This could either be a profile setting or per recipe (per recipe would be more flexible)

Please provide a concise description of the feature that would resolve your issue.

This would greatly assist users when importing recipes that use a different measurement system to their chosen preference.

Please consider and list out some caveats or tradeoffs made in your design decision

Some measurements may not cover easily such as cups; most recipe managers do not attempt to convert these.

Additional Information

• If this is accepted I'm willing to submit a PR to provide this feature
• If this is accepted I'm willing to help maintain this feature
• I'm willing to sponsor/pay a developer to do this work

[ronnybugle]

This would be so awesome!

[TheCodeTrainer]

This would be an incredible feature!

[Spinkman]

if you're going to do this, please separate volume and temperature measurements. (I like my temps in F and measurements in metric)

[Yehuda-Bergstein]

This would be great!

[tecosaur]

It occurs to me that a neat way of doing this might be by introducing a concept of "canonical units". By this, I mean the ability to say that the "canonical" form of 1 lb is 0.454 kg.

These transformations could then be applied when importing/viewing a recipe.

[tecosaur]

I'd imagine this could also help with regional differences in spelling, e.g. liter vs litre.

[EinToni]

This would be a great feature! But I guess for this to work, mealie would have to switch from using a plane string as a unit, to defining actual units. This would also open the door for many other features.

I already don't understand why you can input anything as a unit. There only exist two systems: metric and imperial, so why would one allow the use of anything when 99% of the people just fill in the units with the same metric and imperial names? So changing the units to predefined ones would be only reasonable, I think.

Maybe some mealie contributor will read this :) I would be happy to help implementing this if there is the will to move in that direction.

[enrauk]

Just to note that British, Australian, and American Imperial systems differ on some measures. A tablespoon in the UK is equivalent to 15 ml (same as the EU) whereas in the Australia it is 20 ml and in the US 14.8 ml, for example. Regards, Enrico

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On Sat, 21 Dec 2024, 12:50 Toni, ***@***.***> wrote: This would be a great feature! But I guess for this to work, mealie would have to switch from using a plane string as a unit, to defining actual units. This would also open the door for many other features. I already don't understand why you can input anything as a unit. There only exist two systems: metric and imperial, so why would one allow the use of anything when 99% of the people just fill in the units with the same metric and imperial names? So changing the units to predefined ones would be only reasonable, I think. Maybe some mealie contributor will read this :) I would be happy to help implementing this if there is the will to move in that direction. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#3881 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/APKLCAPIYBCJVEJR5MCC2HD2GVPYJAVCNFSM6AAAAABKV7X45KVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTCNRTG4ZDQNQ> . You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[Christian-Me]

Take a look into this wikipedia article
I stumbled upon this while writing a converter transferring my recipes over to mealie.

It mentions metric units in one sentence

In most of the world, recipes use the metric system of units—litres (L) and millilitres (mL), grams (g) and kilograms (kg), and degrees Celsius (°C).

Saying that most of the world uses 3! Units: grams, liters, and degrees Celsius. That's it, everything else is confusing.🫤

Sure we use convenient things like tablespoons or teaspoons too. But containers, cans or bottles might be wrong if the food industry keeps on downsizing everything.

Perhaps scale everything internally down to metric. From there the appropriate unit could be scaled by users preferences and value (i.e. if more than 1000g than use kg)
Leave special cooking units like teaspoons or tablespoons untouched as they vary by ingredient.

User preferences could be selected differently for weight, volume and temperature to be able to use Degrees Fahrenheit - for whatever reason 😂
Or even single specific preference for individual food items.

Than nutrition values could be calculated automatically out of the ingredients. And perhaps price (it's getting more and more interesting) in future.

[Spinkman]

So, in my own cooking process, I prefer metric and tend to eyeball things.
that being said, and this may be a separate feature request, it would be really nice to have versioning within the recipe.
I'll make the recipe once, and often make changes on the fly based on my family's tastes.
my current work flow is the edit the mealie recipe manually with the changes I did and maybe leave some notes.

Now, how this can apply to unit conversion is to just leave it up to the person if they want to do any conversions at all.
when importing, Mealie can try to determine what unit of measure is being used so that conversions could be done in the future. currently ingredients are all bunched together and aren't numbers/units. so this would be the first (and most painful) step.

After there are separate DB entries for amounts and units separately, then you could have options to define if you want to use automatic unit conversion and also have an area where the user can define the conversion they'd like to use (eg: teaspoon = 14.8? or round to 15?)
doing it this way, you can define for yourself that you'd like a teaspoon to be 5ml a tablespoon to be 15ml and a cup to be 250ml. (this is what I use in my head because it's easier math.)

leaving it as defaults still gets you conversions if you choose and I would suggest rounding the numbers to the nearest integer. or base 5/10

anyway, more options for unit localization only serve to increase world wide usage of this already very useful program.

[enrauk]

Cup measures are also different UK and AU is 250 ml same as metric but US is 240 ml, so I'd convert to 250 ml. Teaspoons and tablespoons if you wanted to convert them I would use metric measures 5 ml (UK, AU and metric 5ml, US 6 ml) and 15 ml respectively (UK and metric 15 ml, US 14.7 ml, AU 20 ml). The differences for most of the world aren't great. Fluid oz to ml I would use 29.57 (US and AU 29.57, UK 28.41). One other point to note is that fl oz to pint is different: UK and AU it's 20 fl oz but for the US it's 16. I can't think of any others that you might need to know. Regards, Enrico

…

On Mon, 30 Dec 2024, 20:23 Chris, ***@***.***> wrote: Take a look into this wikipedia article <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking_weights_and_measures> I stumbled upon this while writing a converter transferring my recipes over to mealie. It mentions metric units in one sentence In most of the world, recipes use the metric system of units—litres (L) and millilitres (mL), grams (g) and kilograms (kg), and degrees Celsius (°C). Saying that most of the world uses 3! Units: grams, liters, and degrees Celsius. That's it, everything else is confusing.🫤 Sure we use convenient things like tablespoons or teaspoons too. But containers, cans or bottles might be wrong if the food industry keeps on downsizing everything. Perhaps scale everything internally down to metric. From there the appropriate unit could be scaled by users preferences and value (i.e. if more than 1000g than use kg) Leave special cooking units like teaspoons or tablespoons untouched as they vary by ingredient. User preferences could be selected differently for weight, volume and temperature to be able to use Degrees Fahrenheit - for whatever reason 😂 Or even single specific preference for individual food items. Than nutrition values could be calculated automatically out of the ingredients. And perhaps price (it's getting more and more interesting) in future. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#3881 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/APKLCAI37WZSUWWX34NVMXT2IGTT3AVCNFSM6AAAAABKV7X45KVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTCNRZHE2TQNI> . You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[ronnybugle]

I use metric (Aus), but I use cups, teaspoons and tablespoons because it's easier to use a measuring cup set. I'm not that bothered whether the recipe is North American and isn't exactly the same measurements, it seems close enough. I would only want to convert ingredients that are like a 14oz can of whatever or 4 oz of mushrooms, because oz and fl oz mean nothing to me.