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Type your dishes and where the photos go — Yelp, Google, Instagram, your menu. Walk away with a brief that gets you the right photos in one shoot, instead of 80 generic plate photos in three. About 10 minutes.
What this does. You list your dishes (or import them from Menu Engineering), tick which destinations the photos need to serve, and the tool figures out the smallest set of source frames that covers everything. It outputs a printable Photo Brief organised by destination surface, with composition / lighting / aspect-ratio specs per shot. Then a Brand Photo Card the chef can pin to the kitchen wall. Nothing leaves the browser; close the tab and the brief is gone.
Five verifiable claims — each you can confirm yourself in DevTools in under a minute.
No photos uploaded, no images processed. Open DevTools → Network. Type a brief, click Compute. Zero requests fire.
Close the tab and reload this URL. The form is empty. We don’t use localStorage, sessionStorage, or cookies for your data.
When you arrive from Menu Engineering or Brand Suite, fragment data populates the form — but the page never re-encodes your edits to the URL automatically. Sharing is a deliberate act, not an accident.
The tool loads /tools/photo-brief/photo-brief.js from this domain. No CDN, no analytics-tied recipe data, no third-party tracker reading the form.
We log that “an 11–25 shot brief was built” in three or four buckets — never the dish names, photographer name, or brief content.
List the dishes you want shot and tick the destinations. The math figures out the minimum number of source frames that covers every destination via crop math — you walk in with the right brief, the photographer shoots half a day instead of three.
Six rows to start. Add or remove. Categories drive the default angle / lighting recommendations — you can override per-shot in the brief.
Drag a row range from Excel / Google Sheets and paste below — or paste a CSV. Headers like Dish, Category, Priority are auto-mapped (Spanish equivalents work too).
| Dish | Category | Priority |
|---|
Tick every destination you publish to. Each surface has a canonical aspect ratio — the brief computes which surfaces share crops so the photographer doesn’t shoot the same dish 8 times.
Specs reviewed: 2026-04. Instagram’s feed default is 4:5 (1080×1350) for new posts; tick Instagram square if you’re feeding an older 1:1 grid. Google Business minimum is 1200×675; Yelp featured is 1920×1280. Platforms drift — we recheck quarterly.
No retouching tricks, no extra props you don't already have. Three styling moves the line cook can do at family-meal time, captured on the same iPhone you already shoot with.
Before
Top-down shot under warm in-house lighting. Cheese reads orange-brown, the lettuce shadows blow out the bun. Plate fills the frame edge-to-edge.
After
Three-quarter angle (45° down). Shot at the pass next to a window — the bun catches daylight from the side, the cheese pull is visible at the seam. The plate breathes — 30% empty around it.
Two changes: angle (top-down → 3/4) and light source (overhead bulbs → side window). Same burger, same plate, same hour.
Before
Tossed flat in a wide bowl. Looks like a bag of greens with the dressing already mixed in — green-on-green-on-green, no contrast points.
After
Greens stacked tall in the center, finishing produce (radish slices, citrus segments, herb tips) placed last on top. Dressing pooled to one side, not poured over. Cracked pepper finish that's visible.
Build it tall, finish on top. The salad in the photo doesn't have to be the salad you serve — this version is for the camera, the kitchen sends out the eat-able one.
Before
Plated and shot 90 seconds after it left the oven. Skin reads matte, the jus on the plate has already absorbed into the potatoes.
After
Shot inside 30 seconds. Faint steam catches the side light. Pan jus spooned over right before the shutter fires — surface is glossy and reflective.
Hot food photographs as hot food only for the first minute. If you're shooting a service dish, plate one on the side ahead of family meal — the kitchen's already up.
These are direction notes, not shot lists. Add the specifics that match your kitchen — what's on the pass, where the daylight comes from, which finishing touches you actually have. The brief above is the structure; this is the texture.
A working tool can be honest about its edges. Photo Brief Builder does five things well and a handful of related things not at all.
What it does next. The brief is most useful when it consumes data from the rest of the toolkit. Menu Engineering tells you which dishes are Stars; Brand Suite gives you the colour world to style around; Plate Cost flags the high-margin items worth the lighting time. Run those first when you can — the brief gets 3× shorter and 3× more useful.
Every check this tool runs maps to a specific concept in the Library. Two starting points — one definition, one playbook.
the one-page sheet you walk into a photoshoot with
A structured shot list a restaurant owner hands to a photographer at the start of a session: which dishes get shot, where each shot is desti…
Read the definition Glossarythe proportion between width and height, locked by the destination
The ratio of an image's width to its height, expressed as w:h. Eight surfaces own canonical ratios: web hero 16:9, OG card 1.91:1, Yelp feat…
Read the definition Glossarythe one photo per surface that does the load-bearing visual work
For a given destination surface (web hero, Yelp featured, Instagram profile-grid lead, Google Business cover), the single photograph that ca…
Read the definition Glossarynot stock photography
Photographs of your space, your food, and your team — not royalty-free stock images licensed from an agency.
Read the definition ArticleEvery image size, aspect ratio, and resolution your restaurant actually needs across GBP, Yelp, OG, and menu thumbnails — in one spec sheet.
Read the playbook ArticleA step-by-step guide to claiming, verifying, and optimizing Google Business Profile for your restaurant — categories, photos, menu links, and the settings most owners miss.
Read the playbookChannel — GBP, Instagram, website, Yelp — by shot type, by last upload date. Catches stale heroes and the channel you forgot about.
Open the sheetDish, plate type, garnish, props, channel target, priority. Lives on set, ticks off as you go.
Open the sheet