Short answer
Include a size reference, shoot at a 45-degree angle rather than overhead, separate overlapping foods, photograph before eating, and correct the estimate when you know what went into the cooking.
Photo calorie logging is only as good as the photo. These habits reportedly improve accuracy by 10 to 15 percentage points — a bigger gain than switching apps.
1. Give it something to measure against
Scale is the hardest thing to infer from an image. Include a known object: your hand, a fork, a standard dinner plate, a can. Without a reference, the model is guessing portion size from context alone, and that is where the largest errors start.
2. Shoot at an angle, not straight down
Overhead photos flatten everything and hide depth. A bowl of pasta shot from directly above looks identical whether it is two inches or five inches deep. A roughly 45-degree angle shows both the surface area and the height.
3. Separate overlapping food
Push components apart before shooting. Rice hidden under curry, or chicken sitting on potatoes, simply does not register. Ten seconds of rearranging is worth more than any model improvement.
4. Photograph before you eat
Obvious, easy to forget. A half-eaten plate is hard to estimate from, and reconstructing it later is guesswork. If you forget, log it by description instead — voice logging is usually more accurate than photographing leftovers.
5. Correct what you actually know
If you cooked the meal, you know things the camera cannot: the two tablespoons of olive oil, the butter in the sauce. Editing the estimate takes seconds and is the highest-quality data the app will ever receive.
When not to bother with a photo
Some foods photograph badly and are faster to describe: drinks, soups, handfuls of nuts, anything mixed into a uniform mass. See also where photo estimates go wrong. For those, voice or text logging is both quicker and more accurate.
