Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

btrapp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 20 posts

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

#2

Post by behzodhalil »

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.

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

#5

Post by behzodhalil »

astaka wrote: post #4

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?

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.

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

#6

Post by behzodhalil »

levi840714 wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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

#8

Post by kotaKat »

kingleopold wrote: post #7

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

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.

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

#9

Post by sifarhub_com »

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.
Post reply on HN