A calorie counter for meals out, from one photo of the table.

How it works

One photo, every dish on the table.

Most photo calorie apps read one plate. A dinner out is rarely one plate: there are starters in the middle, a drink at every elbow and a dessert someone insisted on. PlateDiary reads the whole table at once.

1. Snap the tableThe camera opens inside the app, full screen and instant. One photo when the food lands is enough — or shoot dish by dish if the table is long.
2. Keep the savesYour phone cuts each dish and drink into its own save in about a second, offline. Keep the ones that were yours and put the phone down.
3. Let PlateDiary AI read themTap Read and each save gets a name and, with Calories on, one rough number such as “~640 kcal”. Members can have the read start by itself once the snap has landed.
4. Accept it or change itAccept makes the estimate yours. Edit lets you type your own. The moment then shows a line like “About 2,350 kcal across 4 saves”.

The “~”

A rough number, on purpose.

Restaurant portions vary from kitchen to kitchen and night to night, and a photo cannot see the butter in the sauce. So PlateDiary never pretends: each estimate is one number with a tilde, rounded to the nearest 10 (or 50 past 1,000). You will see “~820 kcal”, never “1,113 kcal”.

The app says it plainly too: photo estimates usually run low. Independent tests of photo calorie apps found the same thing — read how accurate AI calorie counters are before you lean on any of them.

What makes a rough number useful is that you can fix it once. Correct the carbonara at Marco’s to your own number and PlateDiary remembers it for that dish at that place, so the next visit starts from your number, not a fresh guess. No AI needed for that either: you can type a number on any food or drink save yourself.

Built for eating out

Made for the way restaurants actually serve food.

• Shared plates. Split a pizza three ways? Keep the save and edit the number down to your share. The rest of the table is still in the photo, so the night is remembered whole.
• Sides and rice. Fries, naan, a bowl of rice, the bread basket — each one is its own save with its own number, so you can see where the meal really added up.
• Drinks count. A flat white, a margarita or a brown-sugar bubble tea is a save like any other.
• Any cuisine. The read names each dish and its cuisine, from ramen and tacos to pad thai and pasta. Browse rough numbers by cuisine in the restaurant calorie guide.
• No menu numbers needed. Most independent restaurants post no calories at all. The photo is the menu.

The Calories page

What your saved meals add up to.

Turn Calories on and a Calories page joins the app. It adds up the meals you saved — it never guesses at meals you didn’t — and says so: “meals saved”, not a verdict on anyone’s day.

• Today — what today’s saved meals come to, with protein, carbs and fat in grams.
• Week, 4 weeks, 12 weeks or a year — scrub the chart, or see a whole year as a calendar.
• When — by time of day and weekday, so you can see that Friday dinners run richer than Tuesday lunches.
• Dishes — the richest dishes, lighter picks and the ones you save most.
• Where — by place and by companion: the ramen counter you love, the brunch spot you go to with Priya.
• An optional daily number — only if a number helps you. It is off by default; add one and the page reads “~750 left of 2,000” or “~250 past 2,000”, in the same calm colour either way.

Opt-in

Off unless you turn them on.

PlateDiary is a food memory app first. Out of the box there are no numbers at all: just your saves, the places you ate them and who you were with. Calories live behind one switch in Settings → PlateDiary AI → Calories, and with it off the app looks exactly as it did before.

That makes PlateDiary a calorie tracker you can put down. Switch it on for a month of eating out while you get a feel for restaurant portions, then switch it off and keep the memories. See the restaurant journal for everything the app does when Calories are off.

Privacy

What leaves your phone, and what doesn’t.

There is no PlateDiary account to make. Capture, the cut-out, typing your own numbers and browsing all work offline, and your diary stays on your phone.

An AI read needs a connection and asks once before the first one. It sends small pictures of the cut-out dishes, with the place’s name as a hint — never the table photo, faces, or your location — and nothing is kept on the server once the answer is back.

Calorie numbers never go to analytics, and nothing is written to a health app. If you are a member and ask PlateDiary a question, the few saves it looks up go with their rough numbers so it can answer.

Free or PlateDiary AI

What’s free, and what needs PlateDiary AI.

The 10 free tries are shared with PlateDiary’s other AI features and never run out on a schedule — they are yours until you use them. PlateDiary AI is a monthly or yearly membership that includes everything in Premium; prices come from your store, in your currency.

Honest fit

Is it the right calorie tracker for you?

• Good fit: most of the food you care about is eaten out, you want a fair rough number rather than grams on a scale, and you like the idea of the night being remembered too.
• Not a fit: you want barcode scanning for packaged food, you weigh home cooking, or you need precise numbers for a medical reason — in that case talk to a doctor or registered dietitian.
• Comparing options? See PlateDiary as a Cal AI alternative and AI calorie tracker apps side by side.

In PlateDiary

A rough number for the dishes you save — only if you want one.

Sources

Where the facts come from