Pensum
Log a meal from a photo.
Up to five photos of one meal, plus what you already know. Pensum takes your word as fact and returns grams you can edit.
Scan to install
From plate to diary in four steps.
Take the photos
Shoot the plate, or pick photos from your gallery, up to five per meal. They all count as one meal: shoot the main plate, the side salad and the dessert separately, and a food that appears in two shots is still counted once.
Tell it what you know
There are fields for known ingredients, the cooking method, the plate or bowl size and, if you weighed it, the total weight of the food. Pensum treats all of it as fact. A weight you type stays exactly as you typed it, and the rest of the plate is estimated around it.
Check the breakdown
You get each ingredient with its grams and macros. Every ingredient is matched to a food in Pensum's catalogue, so the nutrition per gram comes from the database whenever there's a match. Swap a food, fix a weight, or add what it missed.
Log it
Pick the meal and add everything in one tap. Photo entries are saved as estimated, so a number read from a picture never sits in your diary looking like one you weighed.
The oil you can't see gets its own mark.
Cooking oil, butter and added sugar barely show up in a photo, and they still carry real calories. Pensum adds one only when the cooking method points to it and the photo shows it: a sheen, browning from the pan, a dressed surface. The amount stays small, and the line carries an orange mark so you know it was inferred.
It won't add oil to food usually made without it, like steamed vegetables or a plain pizza. When a food has no match in the catalogue, its numbers come from the AI and the line says AI estimate, so you can swap in a real food before you log.
We measure it against a kitchen scale.
We weigh real plates, replay the exact prompt the app ships, and publish the gram error. The average gap between estimate and scale, per plate:
- Photo alone, better models~20 to 30%
- Photo plus the weighed total~13 to 17%
A small, growing set of labelled plates. The direction holds better than any single figure.
On a fresh plate, giving the model the total weight took a single-photo estimate from roughly 27% to about 13%. Premium models with extended thinking did not beat the lighter ones. Read the research.
When the food is in front of you and a scale is in reach, weigh it. The photo tool is for the restaurant plate and the dish someone else cooked. Read the photo guide for a closer estimate.
“Very clean design. Easy to use and simple to add new meals via barcode, photo, description or simply quick add some plain values.”
Photo logging questions.
How many photos can I use for one meal?
Up to five. They all count as one meal, so you can shoot the main plate, the side salad and the dessert separately. A food that shows up in two photos is counted once.
How accurate is a calorie estimate from a photo?
It is a starting estimate you correct. In our tests against a kitchen scale, the better models missed the grams by about 20 to 30% from a photo alone. Giving them the weighed total of the plate brought that down to about 13 to 17%. The full method and numbers are in the research.
Does Pensum add cooking oil I can't see?
Only when the cooking method points to it and the photo shows evidence, such as a sheen, browning from the pan or a dressed surface. It keeps the amount small and marks the line as inferred, so you can see it and change it. It does not add oil to dishes usually made without it, like steamed vegetables.
What happens to my meal photos?
The photos and your notes go over HTTPS to Pensum's own server, which passes them to an AI model and returns the estimate. They are used only for that estimate and are not stored by us. The details are in the privacy policy.
Can I log a meal without a photo?
Yes. Choose Describe on the add menu and type what you ate, for example 150 g grilled chicken, a cup of rice and a little olive oil. You get the same editable breakdown.
Is photo logging free?
One meal estimate is one AI action. AI is unlimited for your first 30 days. After that, the free plan includes 30 AI actions each month. Pensum Plus adds unlimited AI actions. Searching, barcode scanning and typing in values never count.
Photograph the meal, then fix what's off.