alt.hn

7/30/2026 at 7:25:08 AM

Show HN: An app that logs your meal's calories from a photo

by behzodhalil

7/30/2026 at 7:57:03 AM

What do you do about portion size, and the calories a photo can't see like oil or dressing? Those are the parts that have always made me distrust the number these apps spit out. Curious how you're handling it. Only looked at the landing page so far.

by levi840714

7/30/2026 at 3:42:23 PM

I'm going to safely assume that everything is hallucinated

by adammarples

7/30/2026 at 4:33:34 PM

Fair prior. That's exactly why every number is editable - I treat the model as a quick draft, not a source of truth.

by behzodhalil

7/30/2026 at 9:34:22 AM

Yeah, this is exactly the part I distrusted in other apps too.

So I didn't try to fake it. The model guesses the portion, then you adjust the grams with a slider and the macros rescale live - same "you can always correct it" idea from the post.

Oil and dressing the camera just can't see. That's the honest gap: right now it doesn't add them, so if you know it was cooked in oil, you nudge it up. Rather be approximate and honest than confidently wrong.

Where do the numbers feel most off for you? That's the edge case I want.

by behzodhalil

7/30/2026 at 8:33:02 AM

Some other similar apps do the same thing but it's hard to provdie right and accruate inforation just based on photos by using LLM & OCR. any special design you did in this app?

by astaka

7/30/2026 at 9:30:28 AM

No OCR actually - just a vision model doing the recognition, one prompt, JSON out (Qwen3.6-27B on Groq).

I didn't chase some clever accuracy trick, because like you said, a photo alone can only get you so far. The design bet was different: make it fast and make every number editable, so the friction stays low and you fix the guess instead of trusting it.

It nails simple plates and gets confused by messy/mixed ones — that's the part I'm still working on.

by behzodhalil

7/30/2026 at 1:11:39 PM

the app looks same or similar to fitness apps. As myself I found the apps difficult in managing while doing exercises because you have to constantly do this in phone. I prefer not to .So build something where it would not require manual efforts or minimum manual effort.

by sifarhub_com

7/30/2026 at 4:30:47 PM

Fair - I hate touching the phone between sets too. Right now the app keeps it minimal: photo for meals, quick-tap for workouts. But "zero effort while exercising" is the direction. What would work best for you - logging the whole workout once at the end, or voice/watch input mid-session? Asking because this decides what I build next.

by behzodhalil

7/30/2026 at 1:12:05 PM

looks like even the apple logo in the appstore button is vibecoded.

by interfeco

7/30/2026 at 4:27:06 PM

Ha, that one's on me, not the AI - I made it in Canva myself. Apparently I vibecode by hand too.

by behzodhalil

7/30/2026 at 11:45:12 AM

another BS apps after 100 made the same thing. maybe 1000 made before

by kingleopold

7/30/2026 at 5:00:29 PM

Crowded means unsolved, not worthless

by behzodhalil

7/30/2026 at 11:57:43 AM

What was the phrase in the Apple developer guidelines?

"Certain kinds of apps, such as dating, flashlight, sound effects, wallpaper, simple timers, and fortune telling, are well established on the App Store and we will not accept new submissions unless they offer a meaningfully different or improved experience"

Arguably, this isn't a meaningfully different or improved experience (it's the same boring thing as every other photo-as-calorie-counter-that-never-works-right, unless you count them adding monetization through a 'premium' subscription as a meaningfully different experience), so Apple should have just tossed it from the platform.

by kotaKat

7/30/2026 at 4:57:27 PM

you're right that it's never accurate. neither are we though - people under-report their own intake by 20–40% in actual studies. the photo just has to beat "didn't log anything", and it does.

by behzodhalil

7/30/2026 at 7:28:21 AM

Hi, HN I kept giving up on calorie tracking because trying in every meal was too much work. So I tried building something where I just take a photo and it estimates what’s on the plate. It’s honestly not perfect - it does well with simple meals and gets confused by messy or mixed plates, so you can always correct it. But for me it lowered the friction enough that I actually kept logging.

Under the hood it’s a vision model for the food recognition, wrapped in Kotlin Multiplatform (iOS and Android) with a small Ktor backed.

I’d love feedback - especially where the recognition fails for you, so I can see the real edge cases. Thanks for checking it out.

by behzodhalil