# How to Track Calories When Your Food Is Not in the Database

> If search returns 40 wrong chicken entries or zero for maqluba, photograph the plate. The missing food is the meal you actually eat.

When the food is not in the database, photograph the plate and correct the portion. Do not pick the first "chicken" result with a random calorie count. That is the 1-star complaint on crowdsourced apps: forty duplicate entries, none of them your aunt's maqluba, none of them last night's Swedish leftovers. The database failed because it was built for barcodes. Your dinner was not.

Khatwa is built for unlabeled food: photo, search, or type, in Arabic and English. Save the meal as a favorite the second time. You stop fighting search. You log what was on the table.

![Photographing a homemade meal in Khatwa instead of searching a US database](https://www.khatwa.se/today-meal.jpg)

Skip the 40-result chicken list. Photograph the actual dish.

### If search cannot name it, the camera can still log it

Khatwa logs homemade and regional food from a photo. Free on iOS and Android.

[Download Khatwa Free](https://www.khatwa.se/en#download)

## Arabic and Swedish plates are not edge cases

They are why the app exists. Longer stories: [tracking Arabic food with AI](https://www.khatwa.se/en/blog/tracking-arabic-food-calories-ai-2026.md) and [why we built an Arabic and Swedish tracker](https://www.khatwa.se/en/blog/why-we-built-khatwa-arabic-swedish-calorie-tracker.md).

Download: https://www.khatwa.se/en#download