Why there's no photo scan in our tracker
Photo-to-calories scanning is convenient, but too imprecise for a tracking app – this is a deliberate product decision.
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"Snap a photo, get calories" sounds like magic. It is.
Nearly every new tracking app advertises it in 2026: you photograph your meal, an AI tells you what you just ate. Convenient, fast, futuristic – and not built into our tracker. On purpose.
What a photo can't see
Three examples from ordinary cooking that every photo scan has to fail on:
- The oil. One tablespoon of olive oil is 65 kcal, so three tablespoons used to sauté are 195 kcal – and none of them show up in any photo, because the oil disappears into the vegetables and the pan.
- The sauce. A creamy white sauce might be a cashew sauce with 100 g of nuts in it (around 600 kcal), or it might be a cauliflower sauce (24 kcal per 100 g). On a photo, both look the same.
- The amount. The portion on your plate doesn't get weighed by a photo – and a 2025 study showed that even portion weights end up off in most cases. Every nutrient estimate builds on top of that.
These aren't detail issues that get solved by the next model release; they're things that simply aren't in the photo to begin with.
We've got nothing against AI. Just against made-up numbers.
There are two very different uses of AI in a tracking context, and we like one of them, not the other.
AI for text recognition on a label – photograph a nutrition table, the values get mapped to the right nutrient codes, no typing – is useful. There's an actual source here (the label), and the AI just does the translation work. That's exactly where we use AI.
AI for values-out-of-thin-air – photo of a finished dish, model "recognizes" calories – is a different story. There's no source here; the model invents plausible-sounding numbers. How far off that lands on average, we wrote up with study figures here.
What you get with us instead
If you're eating something you cooked yourself, you set the recipe up once, and we derive the nutrient profile from the ingredient list. For something prepared, you scan the barcode. And if you're eating out, you look the dish up in our recipe database – or import a similar recipe and tweak it. You stay in control of what you're tracking, instead of a model writing a number into your day that no one can trace back.
It's not the most convenient way. But it's the only one where the number you log today still holds up tomorrow.