The food photo diary that fills itself in.

Why pictures

Why a photo diary beats a written one for meals out.

Written food journals usually die in week two, because they ask for effort at the worst moment: when the food is hot and the table is talking. A photo takes a second. The name of the dish, the stars and the note can wait for the ride home — or never come at all, and the photo still holds the night.

That’s the rule PlateDiary is built on: one photo, a few seconds, done. Every other field is optional and stays optional.

Sorting

Saves become moments on their own.

Snap the starters at 7:10 and dessert at 8:35 at the same trattoria, and both land in one moment: same place, within about 90 minutes. Nothing to file, no album to pick.

A moment page holds the night together — the saves set out on a table, who you were with, a note, the bill if you added it, and Last time here: “Your 4th visit”, with a peek at what you had the time before.

Looking back

Your board: five ways to look back.

Search

Search by dish, place, person, note or tag.

Type “burrata” and every burrata comes back. Type a friend’s name, a café, a word from a note (“birthday”), or a tag. Search covers your whole history at once, so the bao from a Taipei night market three years ago is as close as last Friday’s tacos.

Catching up

Bring in the photos you already took.

Import up to ten photos at a time. Each is cut out the same way, keeps its date, and keeps its place when the photo carries one. Photos from one sitting become one new moment; a photo from a night you already saved offers to join it.

A good catch-up ritual: one evening, one month of your camera roll at a time, oldest first.

Names

Names when you feel like it.

Your phone offers name suggestions as one-tap chips, and your own past names come back as chips too — tap “Flat white” instead of typing it for the fortieth time. Nothing is filled in unless you tap.

If you’d rather not type at all, PlateDiary AI can read the saves on a tap and give each a name, a cuisine and three plain tags. Everyone gets ten free tries; it never overwrites a name you typed.

A checklist

Ten things worth keeping besides the photo.

Whatever you use — an app, a notes file, a paper notebook — these are the details people wish they’d written down:

• The dish’s name as the menu wrote it, not what you called it.
• Who was there, and who ordered best.
• The place, and the neighbourhood if it’s a chain.
• One line on why it was good (or wasn’t).
• Would you order it again? Yes, no, or only with someone to share.
• The occasion — a Tuesday, a promotion, a goodbye.
• What you’d skip next time.
• The drink, because nobody remembers the drink.
• Roughly what the table came to.
• Stars, if you like scores — but only after you’ve slept on it.