Feeling peckish? These food porn apps are a feast for the eyes

Hipstamatic with Foodie SnapPak

If you’ve ever dabbled in iPhone photography, you’ve probably encountered Hipstamatic, the award-winning camera app that is filled to the brim with digital filters, flashes, and lenses that mimic the look of yesteryear’s analog cameras. It boasts a manual mode that lets you adjust parameters like exposure, clarity, temperature, easy-to-use presets that sync with iCloud, and a photo editor that saves snaps in a non-destructive file format (i.e., one that lets you undo any edits you make). And an add-on called Foodie SnapPak makes Hipstamatic even more powerful.

The Foodie SnapPak, which is available from Hipstamatic’s HipstaMart Shop, features two new filters inspired by London-based food photo artist David Loftus: The Foodie Lens and Film Pak. With the filters applied, food photos get sharp focus near the center of the image that contrasts with a subtle, hazy vignette around the edges — an effect that looks tailor-made for social media.

Yummi

If you’re the kind of person who could spend hours browsing food photos on social media, Yummi might be the app for you. It’s a new network packed with features for food obsessives, like a meal organizer that categorizes entries by date and cuisine, a geo-tagging option that shows popular dishes and restaurants closest to you, and a nifty bookmarking tool that saves your favorite foods, locations, cuisines, and hashtags. But there’s more to Yummi than food suggestions and restaurant recommendations. You can post snaps yourself using the app’s built-in camera tools, and sort photos you’ve taken by date or location.

If there’s one thing Yummi doesn’t handle as well as the competition, it’s workflow — besides a cropping tool, there aren’t any adjustable parameters to speak of. But as long as you don’t mind editing snaps with another app, Yummi offers one of the most polished food-browsing experiences around.

Foodie

Foodie, a camera app from the folks behind the popular Line messaging app, aims to “make [your] food pictures more delicious” with a “cornucopia” of features. One of those are filters categorized by “Meat,” Sushi,” “Cake” (26 in all) and other self-descriptive and applies an automatic blurring effect to give images an SLR photography feel. Foodie’s brightness and flashlight features give you more shooting options, and a “best perspective” feature that shows you how to perfectly position the camera above the subject.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Foodie connects to social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and helpfully lets you know when the snap you were about to share needs a little TLC — like when it’s too dim, or angled improperly.

Foodgawker

Foodgawker, a nascent social network for self-professed foodies, may not come close to Facebook and Instagram in terms of raw numbers, but it makes up in diversity what it lacks in size. The app boasts a library of more than 325,000 food and drink posts from thousands of food bloggers, each individually curated by editors and updated every day. That includes foreign recipes, which Foodgawker translates to your native tongue on the fly. Foodgawker’s intuitive, infinitely scrolling feed lets you sort images by “Most Favorited” and “Date Posted,” and a handy note/tag feature helps you bookmark favorites.

If you sign in with a Foodgawker.com account, your bookmarked recipes sync with the web app automatically, but Foodgawker doesn’t try to keep you in its walled garden. The app’s sharing features play nicely with Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, and more, and even generate links to relevant recipes and blog posts.

Tender

You’ve probably heard of Tinder, the dating app that serves up photos of matches you approve (or deny) with a swipe. But chances are you’ve never used Tender, a self-described “Tinder for Food” that’s designed to help you find recipes you’ve never tried before. Tender, just like Tinder, customizes results by asking for preferences like favorite cuisine, likes and dislikes, and dietary needs. Once it knows enough about the foods you prefer to cook, Tender pulls up a Tinder-like photo album of recipes that you can save by swiping to the right, discard by swiping to the left, or save to a running “Cookbook.” Viewing a recipe’s details is as easy as tapping a picture, and search tags make sorting through long lists of bookmarked content as easy as apple pie.

Tender, just like Tinder, packs social features. You can share your Cookbook with followers and Facebook friends, and follow other folks who’ve done the same. It’s bare bones, but by design: Tender lets food, not features, take center stage.

Tastemade

Tastemade isn’t like most food photography apps. Instead, it’s sort of like the Food Network of cooking apps — a network of cooking classes, video recipes, entertainment food, and travel shows, all published for free on the web. Tastemade publishes its content on social channels like Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook, but normally, you’d have to seek it out. The app puts all of it at your fingertips.

On Tastemade, you’ll find series hosted by celebrity chefs like Julie Nolke, Jen Phanomrat, Erwan Heussaff, Frankie Celenza, and Katie Quinn, plus step-by-step recipes across categories like “Healthy,” “Vegetarian,” “Dessert,” and “Breakfast.” Most are free, but ponying up $8 a month nets you Tastemade Plus, the app’s premium tier. Among the benefits included are unlimited saves of recipes, videos, and shows, new in-depth cooking classes every week, original programming, and access from any device, platform, and location.

Foodspotting

Foodspotting, once a digital pioneer in food photography and restaurant recommendations, hasn’t seen a major update since 2014, shortly after it was acquired by OpenTable. But despite the app’s stagnation, Foodspotting’s core features and community are alive and kicking.

Foodspotting, like Instagram, lets you post pictures of your favorite dishes for the world to see, but there’s more to it than pretty pictures. You can scout out restaurants by searching across categories and locations, or drill down to pictures and reviews of individual menu items. Foodspotting serves up recommendations from experts and designated “Foodspotters,” and lets you contribute your own opinion on dishes you’ve tried.

If you see a pic or dish you like, you can express your appreciation by tapping the “Loved it!” button, or by starring it for later perusal.