Your city, plated: a map of every meal.

What good looks like

What makes a food map actually useful.

Plenty of apps can put dots on a map. The ones people keep using share a few traits — worth knowing whether you build your own map or pick an app:

• One pin per place, not per photo. Forty pins on your favourite noodle bar is noise.
• Visit counts. The place you’ve been nine times matters more than the one you tried once.
• What you ordered. A pin that can’t tell you what to order is half a memory.
• A way to show only the good ones. When a friend visits, you want your best, not everything.
• Been versus want-to-go, kept apart. Mixing them is how wish lists swallow real memories.
• It fills itself in. If every pin needs a tap, the map stops at month two.

Pins

Pins that place themselves.

When you snap the table, PlateDiary keeps where the meal happened, and the moment drops onto the map. Photos you import keep their place too when the photo carries one.

If a photo has no location — a screenshot, or an old picture from a phone with location off — its moment simply has no place yet. Open it and Add a place: pick a spot on the map, use “I’m here now”, choose one of your nearby moments, or search.

Filters

Filter to food, drinks, or your 4★+.

Switch between All, Food, Drinks, Others and 4★+. Drinks alone turns the map into your coffee and cocktail map; 4★+ is the one to show a visiting friend. Zoomed out, pins gather into clusters so a city of places stays readable, and each pin wears a badge with how many times you’ve been.

One tap deeper

From a pin to a place page.

Tap a pin for a card with your visits, then Open place for the full page: your usual, every dish you’ve had there with a count, each visit, who you usually go with, and Getting there, where Open in Maps hands the address to your maps app. More on that in Places.

The pins and place pages are on your phone, so they open without signal; the map background shows what your phone has already loaded.

Other ways

Other ways to map where you’ve eaten.

Google describes Timeline as off by default and kept on your device, which is why it isn’t on Maps for your computer. If you want to bring a starred list across, see how to export Google Maps saved places.

Ideas

Five things to do with your food map.

• Plan a food trip by looking for the neighbourhoods you’ve never eaten in.
• Find “that ramen place near the station from last winter” without remembering its name.
• Make a 4★+ map for a friend’s first weekend in your city.
• Spot your comfort zone: if every pin is within ten minutes of home, pick a pin-free corner for Saturday.
• Count new places this year against regulars — a nice line for your year-in-food recap.

Sources

Where the facts come from