Guide
Yumbo SeeFood
Take a photo of your meal and SeeFood identifies the food and logs its nutrition for you.
4 min read
Question: What's better than an octopus recipe?
Answer: Eight recipes for octopus.
Jian-Yang's SeeFood could only tell you hotdog or not hotdog. Yumbo's SeeFood goes further: snap a photo of your meal and it names the dish, lists the ingredients and logs the nutrition for you.
Try it
Press See 🐙 👀 Food to analyze the sample photo, or pick one of the other dishes below it. Hover or tap an ingredient to see where it is on the plate.
How it works
Snap or describe
Take a photo of your meal, or pick one you already have. Missed the photo? Describe what you ate from the day's meal slot on your calendar instead, eg "2 scrambled eggs and a slice of toast".
SeeFood takes a look
In a few seconds it names the dish, lists its ingredients and estimates the nutrition.
Logged
The meal lands on your calendar and counts toward your daily goals, and it may drop some loot for your hero.
Get better results
Fill the frame
Get close so the food takes up most of the photo.
Good light
Daylight or a bright room. Dark, blurry photos guess worse.
Keep it in focus
Hold steady, and keep the whole plate in the shot.
Show the label
Packaged food? Include its nutrition label.
If SeeFood can't find any food in a photo, it tells you so and asks you to try again with a clearer one.
Fix the estimate
Portion size is the hardest part to judge from a photo, so the weights are estimates. If you weigh your meal, enter the real total under Weight in the nutrition facts and every nutrient rescales to match: 150g of a 300g estimate counts as half a serving. Ate twice as much? Set the serving size to 2.
Log it again in one tap
Star a meal you eat often, like your usual breakfast, and it's saved to your favorites (up to 30). Logging a favorite again doesn't need a new photo. You can also share a meal to Social with its photo and nutrition.
How accurate is it?
It's the right question to ask. Many photo food trackers claim 90% accuracy, but studies put their real error rates as high as 38%1. Judging portions from a single photo is hard, and harder still for mixed dishes.
Then again, the printed numbers aren't exact either. When researchers measured 269 restaurant foods in a lab, the calories were right on average, but 1 in 5 had at least 100 calories more than the menu said, and one had 1,000 more2. In another study, "reduced calorie" restaurant meals averaged 18% more calories than stated and supermarket frozen meals 8% more, with some items up to double3. Packaged food labels are allowed some slack too: in the US, a food can contain up to 20% more calories than its label says before it counts as mislabeled4.
Many people still trade some accuracy for the convenience of logging automatically5. What matters most is tracking consistently over time: small misses on single meals even out, while the trend in what you eat stays clear.
Daily photos
SeeFood is on every plan: 2 photos a day free, or 10 a day with Premium. Premium starts with a 3-month free trial. Describing a meal counts toward the same daily limit, while logging a favorite doesn't.
Quest
5
1 📦50 XPAnswer all 2 questions to earn the reward.
References
- 1.pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10836267/
- 2.jamanetwork.com https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1104116
- 3.pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20102837/
- 4.law.cornell.edu https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/21/101.9
- 5.pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8409150/