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Take a photo to autofill nutritional information - Feature Request
tarazieminek
Posts: 6 Member
It seems like there's a lot of nutritional entries in this app that don't match the nutritional info on the packaging - even those linked to the barcodes.
Why don't you just add a way for a user to take a photo of the nutritional info on the package and have it OCR this information and automatically populate it? That would reduce the number of entries where lazier users only enter the nutritional data that they care about, while leaving out some of the entries. It would also make it easier for your quality control staff to actually verify the info (assuming there are quality control staff).
The layout of most nutritional labels is pretty standardized - I don't think this would be overly hard to accomplish.
Also, if you started storing the ISO country code with the barcode that might be helpful; it seems like some barcodes are reused for different products in different countries; sometimes the products have different nutritional info (or even different names/brands). That way, you could use the user's country to determine which result to show first - hopefully the correct one. And you'd probably have less people entering duplicate entries when the product data doesn't match the data they see.
Why don't you just add a way for a user to take a photo of the nutritional info on the package and have it OCR this information and automatically populate it? That would reduce the number of entries where lazier users only enter the nutritional data that they care about, while leaving out some of the entries. It would also make it easier for your quality control staff to actually verify the info (assuming there are quality control staff).
The layout of most nutritional labels is pretty standardized - I don't think this would be overly hard to accomplish.
Also, if you started storing the ISO country code with the barcode that might be helpful; it seems like some barcodes are reused for different products in different countries; sometimes the products have different nutritional info (or even different names/brands). That way, you could use the user's country to determine which result to show first - hopefully the correct one. And you'd probably have less people entering duplicate entries when the product data doesn't match the data they see.
18
Replies
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I second this request. I have nothing to add, the original post explained it very well. I’ve seen the OCR nutrition label scanner in other apps, they worked fast and flawlessly. As someone who frequently fixes incorrect/incomplete entries and creates new foods in the database, this would be a massive time saver. It would also significantly increase the database’s reliability, thereby reducing user frustrations.1
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Some of the team were talking about this exact thing just a few days ago. No promises on when it might show up in the apps, but it's something that we are very much aware of. Thanks for sharing!0
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