Got a suggestion on how to improve MyFitnessPal? Share it in this category or vote to tell us what you think of other people’s suggestions. Please be sure to review the Feature Suggestion submissions guidelines.

Scan recipe and have it add into MFP

Instead of scanning a picture of a meal, why can't the app scan a recipe list of ingredients and add it directly into MFP instead of having to individually key in each ingredient and weight. If there is technology to translate a photo into ingredients then the app should be able to read text and convert.
5
5 votes

Active · Last Updated

Replies

  • Jean
    Jean Posts: 839 MFP Staff
    Thank you for this suggestion! Currently, you can import recipes into MyFitnessPal, if they are found on a website.

    That being said, I've still passed along this recommendation to the team.
  • biggsbrian
    biggsbrian Posts: 1 Member
    My wife swears that several months ago (January-ish time frame) she took a picture of the ingredients list for a recipe and MFP read the ingredients and added it to her library. She says that feature isn't there anymore. Was it there at one time and then taken away? She was using the iOS app.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,160 Member
    biggsbrian wrote: »
    My wife swears that several months ago (January-ish time frame) she took a picture of the ingredients list for a recipe and MFP read the ingredients and added it to her library. She says that feature isn't there anymore. Was it there at one time and then taken away? She was using the iOS app.

    Not as far as I know (and I've been here for almost 9 years).

    There are a lot of phones that will extract text from a photo. MFP will let a person paste a list of ingredients into the recipe builder. My phone actually asks me if I want to capture the text in a photo without my even having to trigger it, right in the camera app. That suggests to me that this could be done quite quickly as a two step process, i.e., snap a phone photo of the recipe, extract the text, paste into MFP recipe builder. Any chance that's what your wife might have done? I could easily see myself as thinking MFP had done the whole thing, if I'd done something simple/quick like that several months back.
  • rbachelor
    rbachelor Posts: 1 Member
    The AI tools are widely available to do this now - it should be relatively simple to at least get the majority of the ingredients and amounts correct and let the user make a few minor corrections if needed.