Restaurant Journal_ vs Tastelog
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Restaurant Journal_
This app automatically creates a private map and journal of your dining experiences using your existing food photos. It identifies meals, organizes them by location, and allows you to add ratings, notes, and voice memos without manual check-ins or accounts.
- Automatic journal from photos
- Private dining map
- Meal ratings (Yay, Okay, Meh)
- Add notes and voice memos
- Photo and video storage per visit
- Optional iCloud backup
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Eat. Experience. Remember. Restaurant Journal turns the food photos you already have into a private, beautiful map and journal of everywhere you've eaten — automatically. No typing. No check-ins. No account. You have thousands of photos from meals out — birthdays, first dates, that hole-in-the-wall taco place — and no easy way to remember where any of them were. Restaurant Journal fixes that. It quietly scans your library on your device, recognizes your dining moments, and organizes them into a journal you'll actually want to revisit. A private map of your dining life • See every restaurant you've visited on a beautiful map — from your neighborhood to every city you've explored • Zoom from your street to "everywhere I ate in Italy" • Browse your whole history by month and year Effortless and automatic • Builds itself from photos you already took — nothing to log • Detects visits, groups them by place, and finds the restaurant for you • New meals appear on their own Capture what made it special • Rate every meal : Yay, Okay, Meh • Add notes and voice memos • Keep your photos and videos from each visit • Correct a place, or hide spots you'd rather not track Private by design • Your library is scanned on your device — your photos never leave your phone • No account required • Optional: back up privately to your own iCloud and sync across your iPhones, so you never lose a memory Rediscover your favorites Revisit spots you forgot you loved, and see how your tastes have changed over the years. Perfect for food lovers, travelers, photographers, and anyone who believes a great meal is a memory worth keeping. Your memories are more than photos. They're stories. Restaurant Journal helps you keep them alive.
Tastelog
This app helps you privately document your dining experiences, both out and at home. It analyzes your photo library to identify meals and prompts you for details, creating a personal diary of your culinary memories. You can also log meals manually and share them with friends.
- Scan camera roll for past meals
- Private diary for dining memories
- Log home-cooked meals as recipe cards
- Search diary by keywords or people
- Map of visited restaurants
- Share memories with friends
- Personalized taste summary
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You've photographed hundreds of meals. Could you name the restaurant behind ten? The dish? Who was at the table — or at the stove? Tastelog is a private diary of the meals worth remembering, out and at home. It starts by finding the meals already in your camera roll, and roasting you for them. GET ROASTED Tap Scan my photos and Tastelog goes through the last two years of your camera roll, reading the photos on your phone. It finds the meals, asks a few quick questions while it looks, makes you guess before the verdict — then hands down the roast: a poster with your title and the evidence, one tap from your group chat. Keep the meals, and each one lands in your diary with its place already guessed, waiting for your yes. IT KEEPS UP Took a photo of dinner? Next time you open the app it asks where it was — naming the place when it's sure — and the meal is kept in a tap. Answer once and it never asks about that meal again. Or log one by hand: tap +, or any empty day on the calendar. MORE THAN A RESTAURANT NAME The place is the least of a memory. Note what you ordered, who shared the table, and what the night was for — a birthday, a farewell, a first date you didn't know was one. Add as much or as little as a meal deserves. THE MEALS YOU MADE A Tuesday soup can mean more than a tasting menu. Every home meal is kept as a recipe card: what you made, who cooked, who you fed, what you'd tweak next time, and whether you'd make it again. No ingredient lists, no nutrition, ever. YOUR YEAR, ONE PAGE AT A TIME The diary opens on a calendar, every month filled with your own photos. Search it the way you remember: "that quiet pasta place" or "dinner with Mei" both work. And On This Day brings back meals you'd forgotten you loved. WHAT YOUR APPETITE ADDS UP TO Your taste, set in type: a card composed from your own meals — the dishes you order, the places you go back to, the person who has cooked for you most. No scores, no personality quiz. Just the facts your diary already holds, ready to share. TODAY'S TICKETS Open Today for three tickets: sometimes a place from your diary you said you'd go back to, and dishes worth trying, each with somewhere nearby to eat it. Save one for later, or reshuffle. Tell it what's off the table, and it never deals it. BETTER WITH FRIENDS Tag the friend across the table — or the one who cooked — and the memory lands in their diary too, where they can like it, write on it, and keep it. A gift, not a post. A KEEPSAKE, NOT A FEED No followers. No star ratings to perform. No calorie counting, ever. Your notes stay yours. Every place you've ever logged sits on one map that remembers what guidebooks can't: where you were happy. Your last thousand meals deserved better than a camera roll. Your next thousand start here. Tastelog — the meals worth remembering.
Screenshots
Verdict
Restaurant Journal_ and Tastelog are too close to call on the numbers: across 10 compared parameters — price, rating, review sentiment and ratings volume among them — neither pulls far enough ahead to decide it. What separates them is feature set and interface, not measurable difference.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 5.0 for Restaurant Journal_ against 5.0 for Tastelog. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 3 and 2 respectively. Written reviews split almost evenly too, at 100% and 100% positive.
Both ship on a similar rhythm, roughly every 4 days. The most recent releases landed on October 28, 2026 and October 31, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Restaurant Journal_ | Tastelog |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (3 ratings) | 5.0 (2 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 100.0% of reviews | 100.0% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 3 — better | 2 |
| Update frequency | Every 4 days | Every 4 days |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad — better | iPhone |
| Requires iOS | 17.0 | 16.4 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 7 MB | 69 MB |
| Age rating | 12+ | 12+ |
| Developer | Timothy Brandt | Wenli Dong |
Customer experience
Restaurant Journal_
Tastelog
In-app purchases
Restaurant Journal_
No in-app purchases
Tastelog
No in-app purchases
Questions
Is Restaurant Journal_ free?
Is Tastelog free?
Which has better reviews, Restaurant Journal_ or Tastelog?
Do Restaurant Journal_ or Tastelog have ads?
Which is updated more often, Restaurant Journal_ or Tastelog?
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