One photo of the table. Every dish, cut out.

Under the lid

How a food cut-out is made, on your phone.

The technique is called subject segmentation: a model looks at every pixel and decides whether it belongs to a thing in the foreground or to the background. Draw a soft edge around what’s left and you have a cut-out — the same idea as the die-cut shapes on a paper scrapbook page.

PlateDiary runs this on the phone itself. On iPhone it uses Apple’s Vision framework; on Android, Google’s ML Kit. Nothing has to be uploaded to be cut out, so it works just as well in a basement izakaya with no bars of signal as it does at home.

1. SnapThe camera opens inside the app, full screen, so there’s no jump out to another camera.
2. BrightenThe photo gets a gentle automatic lift, because restaurant light is rarely kind.
3. Find every subjectEach dish, drink and side on the table is found and lifted on its own.
4. ReviewThe cut-outs land in a grid that says “Nice table.” Untick anything you don’t want — the salt shaker, a phone — and keep the rest.

Not just one

Every dish on the table, not just the one you hold.

iPhone has a lovely trick for single subjects: in Photos you touch and hold something and it lifts away from the background, ready to copy or share. It’s perfect for one croissant. A dinner table is rarely one thing, though — it’s the dumplings, the noodles, two iced teas and the mango pudding you said you wouldn’t order.

PlateDiary cuts them out together, then files each one as a save under the same night and place. That’s the difference between a cut-out image and a cut-out you can find again in two years.

Tips

Six ways to get cleaner cut-outs, with any app.

• Shoot from above, or at a gentle angle. Straight-on side shots hide plates behind each other.
• Leave a finger’s width between plates. Dishes that touch can come out as one piece — that’s true of every segmentation model, not just ours.
• Look for contrast. A white bowl on a white tablecloth is hard; pale noodles on a dark wooden table are easy.
• Use the light you have. A window beats a flash, which flattens edges and adds glare to glasses.
• Fill the frame with food. The fewer stray objects in the shot, the fewer you have to untick.
• Keep hands out for one second. Chopsticks mid-grab tend to join the dish they’re holding.

Your camera roll

Bring in food photos you already took.

Years of food photos are probably sitting in your camera roll already. Import up to ten at a time and each one goes through the same cut-out step. They keep the date they were taken, and the place too when the photo carries one — on Android, the photo picker asks once whether to include location info.

Photos from the same sitting collapse into one New moment card; a photo from a night you already saved shows up as Adds to … that moment. A photo with no location simply has no place yet, and you can add one later from its moment.

By hand

When an edge isn’t right, fix it in a tap.

Sometimes the model misses the dipping sauce or merges two bowls. Tap Cut it out myself and pick a mode:

• Draw — trace around the dish with one finger; a magnifier rides above your fingertip so you can see the edge.
• Tap it — tap the dish and it lifts out on its own.
• Shape — frame the food inside a shape when a clean outline isn’t possible, such as soup in a deep bowl.

What happens next

Each cut-out becomes a save.

A save is the cut-out plus everything around it: the place, the time, and — whenever you feel like it — a name, stars, a note and who you were with. Every one of those is optional. Saves from the same place within about 90 minutes gather into one moment, so a long dinner stays one memory.

Your phone suggests names as one-tap chips, and your own past dish names come back as chips too, which is how PlateDiary knows you’ve had the cacio e pepe “eaten 3×”. Nothing is applied unless you tap it. If you’d like the names written for you, PlateDiary AI can read the saves on a tap, with ten free tries: small pictures of the cut-out dishes go up, with the place’s name as a hint — never the table photo, faces, or your location.

Want the untouched photo as well? The camera’s Keep original switch, off by default, saves it to your photo library too.

Side by side

Lift-a-subject, a background remover, or PlateDiary?

Sources

Where the facts come from