MNN - Mother Nature Network

There’s been a bit of buzz on Twitter today about the SnapDish app, a food photo-sharing app, so I thought I’d check it out. According to The Next Web, the Japanese app recently moved into new markets by adding seven new languages and adding an app for the Kindle Fire.

 

It looks like SnapDish is a direct competitor to Foodspotting, but it also does some of the same things that FourSquare and Evernote Food do.

 

The first thing I wondered was, “Do I need yet another food photo sharing method?” No, I don’t. I used Foodspotting for a while, but it got old quickly for me. It also got old for my dining companions, many of whom don’t care about cherishing the memory of every single meal by looking at photographs of it for years to come.

 

I’ve been using FourSquare a lot recently for quick food photos and to learn how it works simply for business purposes. It gets the job done if I want to take a photo of a specific dish and add a few notes, then share it with others.

 

So, if SnapDish was going to be a keeper, it would have to function for me in some way that meets my specific needs at the time. Here’s how SnapDish works:

 

The app is free to download for both iOS and Android devices. I downloaded it to both my iPhone and my Kindle Fire. After creating a free account, I started to play around on my Kindle Fire. Every time I tried to take a photo of food, the app would crash. It’s useless on my Kindle.

 

I had more luck on my iPhone. I was able to take photos and import photos from my iPhone library of previous dishes I’d taken at restaurants. Here’s where I found one feature that none of the competing apps has. Before hitting done and uploading the photo I’d taken or uploaded from my library, I could use the blur feature to make items in the background blury and have the app automatically make the photo look sharper using the “rare, medium or well-done” feature.

 

Take a look at the following three photos.

 

 

This is a photo I took at a Philadelphia tapas bar a couple of weeks ago of some incredibly delicious bacon and date empanadas. It’s blah, like most food photos taken in restaurants with an iPhone.

 

 

This is the same photo when after I clicked on the “medium” button in SnapDish, and it was automatically altered a bit. The colors are brighter and the food really does look more delicious, which is what the app says it will do for your food.

 

 

This is the photo after the original had been imported into iPhoto on my computer, and I used the automatic “enhance” feature. I tried it just to see how well it worked, and I don’t think the enhancement is as much as the SnapDish improvements.

 

If you take quick photos of the food you eat with your phone and you want to share them with a social network AND you want those photos to look as good as possible, SnapDish seems like it’s the best app for that. It doesn’t, however, give you the ability to crop photos.

 

Other than the “rare, medium, well-done” feature, SnapDish seems to have one other feature not common on other apps. You can put in recipes of the food in your photos, but the app advises you not to share someone else’s recipes, only your own. So if you make a recipe you found on someone else’s website, you can post of a photo of it, but not a copy the recipe.

 

With SnapDish you can connect with others who use the app, make comments about their photos and share them, and, as the SnapDish website says, “record your dishes as a life log with elegance and style.” Other apps allow you to do the same.

 

I don’t think I’ll be leaving the SnapDish app on my iPhone and using it regularly, but I can see why some people who are interested in recording every dish they eat might want to. I do think that I’ll be re-installing it from time to time simply to use the photo-fixing feature that’s one of the better free ones I’ve seen.

 

Have you tried SnapDish? What are your thoughts?