This Freshly Updated App Counts Calories Just By Snapping Pictures of Your Meal

Counting your calories might just have gotten a lot easier.

Most weight-loss apps today have food-tracking functions that let you keep a tab on what you have consumed in a day. But, according to the people at popular app Lose It, the burden of logging each and every meal is one of the top reasons why people stop using such apps.

But Lose It hopes to remedy that with a new feature called Snap It. Available on Lose It’s current Android and iOS app version, Snap It allows the user to snap a picture of their food to track its calories. The app automatically identifies what food is in the image, and offers an estimated calorie count, according to DigitalTrends.

What’s more, the makers of the app said that its image recognition is better than tech used by researchers at Cornell University, The University of California, Los Angeles, and even Google.

“FoodDist, the model developed by researchers at Cornell and UCLA, has, until now, held the highest accuracy of 83.1 percent for top-one accuracy and 95.8 percent for top-five accuracy,” A Lose It spokesperson said. “Snap It’s model improves upon that benchmark by meeting an accuracy rate of 87.3 percent for top-one accuracy, and 97.1 percent for top-five accuracy.”

If the app can’t correctly identify food from an image, you’ll still be able to enter it manually. It’s worth noting that even when it does correctly identify a food, you’ll still need to select the appropriate entry, and adjust for serving size and other information. So while it doesn’t entirely automate the tracking process, it does make it a lot easier, according to Mashable.

Besides Snap It, Lose It also has all of the features traditionally found on weight-loss apps, including challenges, the ability to connect to a fitness tracker, and bar code scanning. And while Snap It is currently still in beta, several app reviewers — including Engadget writer Nicole Lee — said that they found the new feature makes the entire process a lot more convenient, and perhaps most importantly, makes it easier to stick to a consistent food logging habit.

The new version of Lose It is currently available on both the Apple App Store.