Use the AI meal scanner
Updated 2026-07-06
The Smart Meal Scanner turns a photo of your plate into a food log entry. Instead of searching for "dal tadka" and "jeera rice" one by one, you take one picture, review what the AI identified, adjust portions if needed, and log the whole meal in a few taps.
How to scan a meal
- On the Home tab, find the Smart Meal Scanner banner and tap Try Now.
- Take a photo of your plate.
- The scanner identifies the foods it can see and estimates the nutrition for each.
- Review the results. Check that each item is what you actually ate — rename or remove anything it got wrong.
- Adjust the portions to match your plate.
- Log it. The meal is added to your Daily Log and counts toward your day's totals.
The whole flow usually takes less time than typing a single food name.
Take photos that scan well
The scanner is only as good as the photo you give it. A few habits make a big difference:
- Shoot top-down. Hold your phone directly above the plate so every item is visible. Side angles hide food behind other food.
- Use good light. Daylight or a bright kitchen light works best. Dim restaurant lighting and harsh shadows make dal look like curry and curry look like dal.
- Keep items visibly separate. If your roti is sitting on top of the sabzi, the scanner may only see the roti. Give each item its own space on the plate.
- The thali rule: scan before you mix. Once dal goes into rice or you've crumbled roti into your sabzi, even a human can't tell what's on the plate. Photograph the thali when it's fresh and everything is still in its own katori.
One extra tip for second helpings: scan your plate at the start of the meal, and if you go back for more, log the extra serving separately rather than trying to mentally add it later. Two small accurate logs beat one big guessed one.
Always review before you save
The scanner's output is an estimate, not a measurement. It's identifying food from a photo, and Indian food is genuinely hard — a katori of kadhi, a katori of dal, and a katori of kheer can look similar from above, and it can't see the ghee stirred into your dal or the sugar in your chai.
So before you log:
- Check the food names. If it identified khichdi as plain rice, correct it — the macros are quite different.
- Check the portions. The scanner estimates quantity from the photo; you know whether that was one katori or two.
- Add what the camera can't see. Extra ghee, sugar in drinks, or the papad that was off-frame.
A reviewed scan is a great log entry. An unreviewed scan is a guess with a photo attached.
When scanning isn't the best tool
- Homemade recipes with your own proportions — if you eat your family's dal or poha regularly, create it as a custom food once so the nutrition matches your recipe exactly, not a generic estimate.
- Meals already on your plan — if you ate exactly what your plan said, just tick it off in the Daily Log; no photo needed.
- Drinks and packaged snacks — these are usually faster to add by searching or as a custom food.
Used for what it's best at — mixed plates, restaurant meals, office lunches, anything you'd otherwise skip logging because searching felt like too much work — the scanner removes the biggest excuse for not logging at all.
Still stuck? Email contact@diet2fit.com — a human reads every message.