A food diary made of photographs, not numbers

Almost nobody keeps a food diary for more than eleven days, and the reason is not willpower. It is that logging a meal is data entry — a search box, a portion size, a unit, four taps and a guess. A photograph is two seconds and no arithmetic, and it is more honest than any number you would have typed.

An album that is not about a face

This is the part that had to be built rather than assumed. Selfeed began as a diary of a face, and every layer knew it: the camera would not fire without one, and the frame was constructed by putting the eyes on a fixed line.

An album now says at birth what it is about, and everything downstream reads that answer. Make one for meals and the camera stops looking for a face, no detector runs, and each frame is built from the middle of the picture instead. A plate is not a failed portrait; it is a different subject, and the app treats it as one.

What this is not

It is not calorie tracking, and it will not tell you anything about a meal. There is no nutrition database behind it, no macros, no scoring, and nothing that pretends to know what is on the plate.

What it does is make the record exist at all — which, for most people who have tried and quit a proper food diary, is the part that was actually missing. A month of photographs of what you ate is a thing you can look through in ten seconds and draw your own conclusions from. It is also a record you cannot round in your own favour while typing it.

Once a day, or every plate

The reminder arrives at an hour you pick, which for this album is usually the meal that is hardest to be honest about rather than the one that photographs best. One frame per day per album is the rule, so the album holds a series rather than an evening.

If you want more than one meal a day recorded, that is more than one album — breakfasts and dinners are two different series, each with its own streak and its own film, and a missed dinner does not reset breakfast.

Who sees it

Nobody, unless you take three deliberate steps: choose a handle, turn your public profile on, and feature one album. The featured album is one album, so a plate can be the public one while everything else stays shut, or the other way round.

When it is shared, it goes to people who follow you and it reaches their home screen quietly, without a notification. A shared food album is unusually good at this: it is genuinely interesting to see, and it carries none of the weight a photograph of a face does on a day somebody feels bad about theirs.

What is kept

Every day's frame stays for good on a free account. The original photograph is kept ninety days free, and for as long as the account lives on Selfeed Pro. Ninety days of dinners is roughly eleven seconds of film and, more usefully, a season you can scroll.

Start with the photos already on your phone

People photograph food constantly and then never look at it in order. On iOS, past days can be filled from the camera roll — a free account reaches ninety days back, Pro the whole library. For this album in particular, that usually means the diary starts already full.