Tel Aviv Menu Photography for Print, QR Menus and Delivery Apps

Plan the shoot around Tel Aviv daylight

Tel Aviv has a wide swing between seasons, and that changes what window light can do for you. Around the June solstice the city gets about 14 h 06 min of daylight and the noon sun sits about 81 degrees above the horizon, almost overhead. Around the December solstice it drops to about 9 h 54 min of daylight with the noon sun at about 34 degrees, low enough to reach deep into a room.

Build a shooting calendar from that. From May through August, work in the morning from a north-facing window, or use a west window after about 17:00 when the sun has dropped. Between November and February, the low sun streams in through south and west windows for most of the day, so those months are the easiest for window-lit menu batches. In March, April, September and October the sun passes through the steep angles, and midday window light turns hard and short: shoot before 10:00 or after 16:00.

Test the light before you commit a whole menu to it. Put one white plate on the table at the spot you plan to use and look at the shadow under the rim. A soft, short shadow means you are ready. A hard-edged shadow with the sun's outline means move back from the glass or hang a thin white curtain.

Batch shooting a full menu consistently

Consistency comes from fixing everything except the food. Choose one table, one background surface and one camera position, and shoot the entire menu from there over one or two sessions. A phone on a small tripod or a stack of books at roughly 45 degrees gives a natural view of plated dishes; a straight overhead view at 90 degrees works better for bowls, hummus plates and mezze spreads where the pattern matters more than the height.

Shoot in the same order as your menu sections so the files land in the folder already grouped. For each dish, take one wide frame that shows the whole plate and one closer frame at about half the distance, filling roughly 70 percent of the frame with food. The close frame is what survives a small delivery-app thumbnail; the wide frame is what you use for a printed page or a hero banner.

Keep a simple log as you go: dish name, section, whether it is a permanent item or a special, and the date. Ten seconds per dish here saves an hour of guessing later. Tap the plate to lock focus and exposure, and if your phone has a manual exposure control, pull it down slightly on white plates so the highlights do not blow out.

• One table, one background, one camera height for the whole menu
• Two frames per dish: full plate and a closer crop at about 70 percent fill
• Shoot section by section in menu order
• Note the date and whether the dish is permanent or seasonal

File naming that survives a menu change

Name files so that a stranger could rebuild the menu from the folder alone. A workable pattern is section, dish, view and date: starters-hummus-close-2025-03. Use lowercase, hyphens instead of spaces, and no Hebrew or Arabic characters in the filename itself if the file will be uploaded to a platform or a web menu. Keep a separate spreadsheet or document with the Hebrew and Arabic dish names next to the filename, since menus in Israel are commonly written in Hebrew and Arabic and the display name should match what guests read.

Store the master file, not the exported tile. If you shoot at the phone's full resolution, keep that version and export smaller copies for each surface: a square 1:1 for feed tiles, a 16:9 or wider crop for a website header or a printed band, and a vertical 4:5 for social posts. When a dish changes, you replace one master and re-export, rather than hunting for the version that was uploaded last spring.

When a dish is retired, move its files into an archive folder instead of deleting them. Menus often bring back a seasonal plate, and the old photo with a new date in the filename is faster to reuse than a new shoot.

Matching photos to each surface

A printed menu wants a tight, evenly lit crop on a plain background, because ink on paper flattens contrast. A QR menu viewed on a phone in a dim room needs a brighter, higher-contrast image that reads at thumbnail size. Delivery listings crop aggressively and often show the photo inside a square tile with text over part of it, so keep the food centered and leave a little empty space around the rim of the plate.

For Wolt in Israel, this site has a dedicated spec page at /delivery-photo-specs/wolt/israel/ that covers the upload requirements. Wolt does not publish pixel specs in a way you can rely on from outside the upload screen, so check the upload screen itself for the current size and format before you export a batch. Wolt also does not accept AI-generated or altered images: shoot your own real photo of the dish and upload that. 10bis is the other delivery platform operating in the country, and its requirements should be checked in its own merchant upload flow.

Keep a small reference sheet taped near the computer listing which crop goes where. It stops the same square tile being stretched into a website banner.

Keeping photos in sync with the menu

Set a rhythm rather than reacting. Once a month, open the menu document next to the photo folder and check three things: dishes with no photo, photos of dishes no longer served, and dishes whose portion or plating has visibly changed. Price changes do not require a new photo unless the price is printed on the image, which is a good reason to keep prices out of the photo and in the menu text.

When a new dish goes on, photograph it the same day it is first cooked for service, before the kitchen settles into a rushed version. Use the same table and camera position as the original shoot even if the light is different, and correct the exposure afterward. If a whole section changes at once, book a single batch session rather than shooting one dish at a time over weeks, which is how menus end up with mismatched backgrounds.

On the merchant's own channels, a real photo of the restaurant's own dish can be improved for light, background and crop while keeping the food as it is; FoodPhoto does exactly that and returns each photo as a kit of sizes for the website menu, Instagram, a QR menu, Google Business Profile and print. It cannot guarantee approval by any platform, and for Wolt the merchant uploads their own real photo.