Organising Baby Food Photos and Notes So You Can Actually Find Them Later

2026-10-05

Three months into solids, my camera roll had 400 pictures of food. Orange mush in a blue bowl. Orange mush in a white bowl. Something green on a high-chair tray. A half-eaten piece of toast with a small hand in frame.

All of it useless. Not because the photos were bad, but because a photo on its own answers one question (what did it look like) and leaves every other question open: what day, what was in it, how much actually got eaten, what happened afterwards. By the time I needed that information, I was scrolling a camera roll that also contained a holiday, two birthdays and a lot of pictures of the cat.

This is a post about fixing that \u2014 not about taking better photos, but about making sure a photo and the words that explain it end up in the same place.

Why photos drift away from their meaning

The photo is taken in the moment, when you know everything. You know the puree had carrot and potato in it because you made it twenty minutes ago. You know the rash showed up that evening. None of that is in the image file.

What the image file keeps is a timestamp. That is genuinely useful \u2014 it is the one thing a camera roll does well, and it is why people keep reaching for photos as a record. But a timestamp with no description means that later, you are reconstructing the meal from pixels. Was that squash or sweet potato? You will not know.

The fix is boring and it works: never let a food photo exist without a sentence attached to it.

The one-sentence rule

When you take the picture, write one line. Not a paragraph. One line that contains the things a photo cannot show:

• What was actually in it, including the parts you cannot see (the oil, the stock, the yoghurt stirred through)
• Whether it was homemade or from a jar, and if from a jar, the brand and variety
• Roughly how much ended up eaten versus on the floor
• Anything odd \u2014 turned away, gagged, ate it twice as fast as usual, nothing at all

That is it. Thirty seconds. The test for whether your sentence is good enough: imagine reading it in four months with no memory of the day. Does it still tell you something? "Lunch" fails. "Carrot + potato puree, homemade, batch from Sunday, ate most of it, no fuss" passes.

Where to put the pair

A photo and its sentence have to live in the same record, or they will separate. In practice there are three ways this goes:

1. Camera roll plus a separate written log. This splits every meal across two systems. You can make it work by noting the time in your log and matching it to the timestamp later, but you are doing manual joins on your own life.
2. A notes app with inline images. Better \u2014 the photo sits under the text. The weakness shows up at search time: you are scrolling a long document, and notes apps do not let you filter by food.
3. A diary structured around entries, where each entry has a date, a food, a note, and a photo as fields rather than free text. This costs slightly more at write time and pays back enormously at read time.

This is one reason Pudding stores the photo as part of the food entry itself rather than as a loose attachment \u2014 the picture, the date and the note are a single thing you can pull up by searching the food. It is free, runs entirely on the phone, and needs no account, which also means the photos of your kitchen table are not going anywhere.

Make the history searchable, not just complete

A complete record you cannot query is a diary you will never open twice. Two habits make the difference:

Name foods the same way every time. Decide once whether it is "sweet potato" or "kumara" or "SP", and never mix them. Inconsistent naming is the single biggest reason a search comes back empty when the entry is right there. If two people are writing, agree on the spellings out loud.

Keep ingredients visible, not hidden in a dish name. "Veggie bake" is a dead end. "Veggie bake \u2014 courgette, tomato, cheese, egg" is searchable by every component. When you later want every day that involved egg, this is what makes it findable.

Photograph fewer things, better

You do not need a picture of every meal. Pictures earn their place when they capture something words struggle with:

• The label of a jar or packet, so the full ingredient list is preserved without transcribing it
• A new texture or cut you want to compare against next time
• Something on the skin or in a nappy that you may want to describe to your pediatrician later \u2014 photos of changes over time are far easier for a doctor to interpret than your memory of them

For everything else, the sentence is enough. Fifty well-labelled entries beat four hundred unexplained photographs, and you will actually read them back.

A note on what the record is for

All of this organising serves one purpose: when a question comes up, you can answer it with something better than a guess. What the answer means \u2014 whether a pattern matters, what to do about it \u2014 is a conversation for your pediatrician. Your job is to walk in with a history that is legible. Theirs is to interpret it.

One line per photo. Same words every time. Ingredients spelled out. That is the whole system.