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Add Photo Match ingredients to your grocery list

Photo Match captures what’s in your kitchen. The most useful follow-up is figuring out what’s not there — what you need to buy.

There are two common flows from Photo Match into the grocery list:

  1. Add identified items directly — useful when you took photos outside your fridge (e.g., a meal plan ingredient list on paper).
  2. Subtract from a target list — useful when you know what you need (a recipe or week of recipes), and Photo Match tells you what to exclude from grocery because you already have it.

Add identified items directly

After reviewing the Photo Match results:

  1. Tap Add to grocery list at the bottom.
  2. A preview opens, showing which identified items will be added.
  3. Uncheck anything you don’t actually need to buy (e.g., items you already had — the inventory is what you have, but maybe you photographed someone else’s fridge for context).
  4. Tap Add all.

The items appear in the Grocery tab grouped under a “From Photo Match (date)” section.

This flow is less common than the next one, because typically you photograph what you have, not what you need.

Subtract from a target list (most common)

The really useful workflow: you’ve planned a week of meals, you have a long grocery list, but you don’t know what’s already in the fridge. Photo Match identifies what you have; Forktastic subtracts those from your planned grocery list.

  1. Build your grocery list first (manually, from a recipe, or from your meal plan). See Auto-populate grocery from your meal plan.
  2. Open Photo Match and capture your fridge / pantry as usual.
  3. After review, tap Compare to grocery list.
  4. Forktastic shows a three-column view:
    • In your grocery list AND identified by Photo Match — these you can probably remove from grocery (you already have them).
    • In your grocery list but NOT identified — these you actually need.
    • Identified but NOT in your grocery list — info-only; things you have that aren’t on the buy list.
  5. For each “AND” match, tap Remove from grocery to remove it.
  6. Tap Done.

You end up with a leaner grocery list — only the things you don’t already have.

Confidence threshold

For the subtract flow, Forktastic only auto-suggests removals for items with high confidence from Photo Match. Yellow/red confidence items appear in a “Review manually” section — you confirm or skip each.

This prevents accidentally removing flour from grocery just because the AI thought it might have seen flour in a back-shelf bag.

Quantity awareness

If Photo Match estimated a quantity for an item (e.g., “approximately 2 lb chicken”), Forktastic compares against the grocery list quantity:

  • If you have enough, the item is suggested for removal.
  • If you have some but not enough (need 2 lb, have 1 lb), the item is suggested for reduction — keep the item but lower the grocery quantity.

These suggestions are best-effort. Forktastic doesn’t pretend to be a precise inventory tracker.

What’s left after

The remaining grocery list is what you should actually shop for. From there: