Menu Photography in Vancouver: Full-Menu Shoots, File Naming and Staying in Sync

Plan the batch before you cook anything

Full-menu photography fails when it is treated as a series of one-off shoots. Pick one day per quarter, list every item that will be on the menu for the next three months, and shoot in a single session so lighting, background and plating style stay identical across the set. A card that looks the same on the printed menu, the QR menu and Uber Eats reads as one restaurant; a mix of three sessions and two phone upgrades reads as a patchwork.

Group the list by how the dish photographs, not by menu section. Soups, curries, sauces and anything in a bowl need a low camera angle and a dark bowl to hold contrast. Flat items like sandwiches, sushi rolls, pizza and plated seafood need a higher angle, around 45 degrees, so the topping is visible. Grouping this way lets you keep one tripod height and one light setup for a run of similar dishes, which is faster and more consistent than plating in menu order.

Decide the master aspect ratio now. Shoot every dish slightly wider than you need at 4:3 or 3:2 and keep the full frame as your master. Square 1:1 crops for grid tiles, 16:9 for website banners and 9:16 for social stories can all be cut from that master later without another shoot.

• One shoot per menu cycle, every dish on the same day
• Group dishes by camera angle: bowls low, flat plates at about 45 degrees
• Shoot wider than needed and keep the uncropped master
• Include drinks, sides and desserts, not only the signature plates

Use Vancouver's daylight on a monthly schedule

Vancouver's daylight swings hard across the year, and that changes when window light is usable. Around the June solstice the city gets about 16 h 02 min of daylight and the noon sun reaches about 64 degrees above the horizon. Around the December solstice it gets about 7 h 58 min and the noon sun reaches about 17 degrees. High summer sun comes in steep and short-shadowed; low winter sun comes in almost horizontally and drags long shadows across a table.

That produces a workable shooting calendar. From May through August, shoot mid-morning or mid-afternoon at a window that faces away from direct sun, and use a white foam board on the shadow side to fill. The steep noon sun is too harsh to use directly, so keep the table back from the glass by roughly a meter and let the light bounce in. From November through February, the low sun rakes in sideways and is soft enough to use directly for much of the day, but the usable window is short, so book the shoot for late morning and expect to finish by early afternoon. March, April, September and October sit between the two: the light is manageable but changes fast, so shoot the most difficult dishes first.

Whatever the month, turn off overhead tungsten and fluorescent lights and rely on the window plus a reflector. Mixed color temperature is the most common reason a set of dish photos looks mismatched.

• June to August: shoot mid-morning or mid-afternoon, table about a meter back from the glass, white board for fill
• December to February: use the low side light directly, finish by early afternoon
• March, April, September, October: shoot the hardest dishes first while the light is stable
• All year: kill overhead lights, use one window and one reflector

Shoot for printed menus and QR menus as well as apps

A printed menu is usually the least forgiving output because it is viewed under restaurant lighting and printed at small size. Shoot the printed-menu items at a tighter crop with clean, uncluttered backgrounds so a 5 cm thumbnail still reads. For a QR menu, the photo is viewed on a phone at arm's length, so the same square crop that works for a delivery tile works here, but keep the file size modest so the page loads on cellular data.

Menus in Canada are commonly written in English and French, and a QR menu that switches language should switch the photo captions with it, not the photos. Keep one image per dish and let the text layer change. If you operate 20 or more locations in Ontario, calorie labeling for standard menu items applies under the Healthy Menu Choices Act, 2015, and the photo and the calorie figure must match the same portion, so shoot the exact plate that was measured.

Name and store files so the menu stays in sync

Adopt a naming pattern before the shoot, not after. A workable one is item-number-dish-name-version, for example 04-salmon-nigiri-v3. The item number ties the file to the menu system, the name makes it findable by anyone on staff, and the version number tells you which image is live. Never name files by date alone; a folder of IMG_4471 tells the next person nothing.

Keep one master folder per menu cycle and one live folder that matches the current menu. When a dish changes, retire the old file by moving it to the archive folder rather than deleting it, so you can restore a photo if the dish returns. When a price changes but the dish does not, do not reshoot; update the menu text and leave the image alone. When a portion changes, reshoot, because the photo is now inaccurate.

The most common sync failure is a photo of a dish that was removed two menus ago still sitting on a delivery listing. Put a quarterly check on the calendar: walk the live menu item by item against the live folder and the delivery listings at the same time.

• Pattern: item-number-dish-name-version
• One master folder per cycle, one live folder that matches today's menu
• Archive retired dishes instead of deleting them
• Price change means text edit; portion change means reshoot
• Quarterly walk-through of menu, folder and delivery listings together

Match each file to the platform's own upload screen

This site publishes photo spec pages for several platforms used by Canadian restaurants: Uber Eats, DoorDash, BentoBox, Olo, Ritual, Square Online, Toast and Yelp, each at a Canada-specific URL. Skip and SkipTheDishes also operate in Canada. Where a platform does not publish pixel specs, we say so on that page, and the reliable move is to open the actual upload screen in the merchant dashboard and check the stated dimensions and file limits there before you export.

Export from your master rather than re-cropping a crop. Keep the master at full resolution, then produce one square 1:1 tile, one 16:9 banner and one 9:16 vertical per dish, and upload the version each surface asks for. If a platform bans AI-generated images, shoot and upload your own real photograph of the dish to that platform, and do not describe any file as approved or ready for it.

For the restaurant's own channels, meaning the website menu, Instagram, Google Business Profile, a QR menu and print, FoodPhoto takes a real photo of the restaurant's own dish and improves light, background and crop, keeping the food as it is, and returns every photo as a kit of sizes. It cannot guarantee approval by any platform, so the upload screen still decides.