The Free Foodie App Will Improve Your Food Photos

I was recently in Germany for the opening of the Courtyard Hamburg City. I had dinner with a few travel journalists, and as is always the case these days, when the food came out everyone knew not to touch any of the shared plates until all phones had been whipped out and photos had been taken. What’s funny is that I used to take photos of my food back when I first started doing press trips in 2004 and journalist would laugh at me for it. They thought it was so weird. But now if you don’t take a photo, they think you’re weird. How times have changed.

I digress. The point of my story is that while we were all snapping pics, I noticed that one of my colleagues captured a photo that was way better than mine. I asked what app or filter she used, and she said she used the Foodie app. I’d never heard of it (available free on both iOS and Android), but another colleague agreed that it’s a great tool. So of course I downloaded it immediately and started using it.

I was amazed by how much better my food/restaurant pics suddenly were (it can also be used to shoot video). I think the big thing with the Foodie app is that it brightens your photos, which is important since restaurants are usually dark, especially at night. Below is a shot I took on a whiskey-tasting tour. The top photo is just using my iPhone 10’s camera and the one below it was filtered through the Foodie app.

You can see that the Foodie app makes a huge difference. Via the App Store, it has over 30 “professional quality live filters including the Yum, Positano, Tropical, Picnic, Sweet, Fresh, BBQ, Romantic, Crispy, and Chewy filter series,” but I haven’t used any of them yet. I’ve only used the default filter, and it seems to do the trick. However, there was one time that I found it made my photo worse, which was in a restaurant that had red lighting (almost like heat lamps). But overall, it’s worth trying.