We scored 1,600 restaurant food photos on Instagram
We scored 1,600 food photos from the Instagram feeds of 745 restaurants in 10 US cities. We wanted to know what restaurant food photos on Instagram really look like, away from the handful of famous feeds everyone points to. And we wanted to know if the better photos get more likes.
The short version: most feeds are not professional shoots, the photos land all over the scale, and in our data the better photos did not win more likes. Details below.
How we scored the photos
For each restaurant we looked at its 4 newest posts. If a dish or a drink was the subject, we scored the photo itself, not the food, on this scale:
- Styled professional shoot. Planned light, props, a photographer.
- Strong. Well lit, considered framing, nothing in the way.
- Decent phone photo. Nothing wrong, nothing special.
- Usable with obvious problems. Color cast, messy background, flat light.
- Dark or blurry. Underexposed, out of focus, harsh flash or a bad angle.
These are our scores, a judgment call made the same way for every photo. They are not a measurement of anything. We also sorted each feed into a type: mostly professional, mixed, mostly phone photos, or little food at all.
What the feeds look like
Of the 745 feeds in our review:
- Mixed, some strong shots and some casual ones: 40%
- Little food at all, mostly people, rooms, events and news: 23%
- Mostly professional: 18%
- Mostly phone photos: 19%
So 82% of the feeds we reviewed were not mostly professional. If your feed is a mix of good days and rushed days, you are in the biggest group.
How the food photos scored
Across 1,600 food photos, here is where they landed:
- Styled professional shoot: 15%
- Strong: 33%
- Decent phone photo: 33%
- Usable with obvious problems: 18%
- Dark or blurry: 1%
The usable-with-problems and dark-or-blurry levels together hold 19% of the photos. The problems our scale marks down are ordinary ones: dim light, a busy background, a color cast from warm bulbs, a flash that flattens everything. None of those need a photographer to fix. They need a window, a cleaner corner of the table, and a few more seconds.
Did better photos get more likes?
We expected yes. Our data says no.
To compare fairly, we measured each post against the same restaurant's own typical post, so a big account does not drown out a small one. Then we checked how often a food photo beat its own restaurant's typical post.
- Food photos we scored strong or professional: 37% of the time, across 476 photos.
- Food photos we scored decent or lower: 44% of the time, across 463 photos.
The photos we scored higher actually beat their own typical post less often, and that gap is bigger than our rough chance check would expect. In the 113 feeds where we had both higher and lower scored food photos with likes, the higher scored ones did better in 47 feeds and worse in 60.
We are telling you this even though we sell better food photos, because it is what we found. Likes on Instagram follow a lot of things at once: the dish itself, the caption, who is in the shot, when it went up, and what the app decided to show. A polished photo is not a like machine.
Where a good food photo earns its keep is anywhere a guest is choosing what to order: your menu, your delivery app listing, your Google listing, your website. We did not measure those in this study, so we will not put a number on them.
What the captions do
A few things we counted around the photos:
- In our review, 59% of food posts named the dish in the caption, word for word.
- The typical caption ran 29 words.
- 54% of posts used no hashtags at all.
- 44% of posts carried a location tag.
Naming the dish is free and it helps someone who wants to order the thing they just saw. A location tag is also free, and most of the posts we read did not have one.
What to take from this
- Fix the light first. Dark photos and harsh flash sit at the bottom of our scale. Shoot near a window, turn off the warm overheads if you can, and skip the flash.
- Clear the frame. Move the napkin, the phone, the ketchup bottle. A clean corner of a table beats a styled set you will never build.
- Do not wait for a photoshoot. Plenty of the feeds we reviewed run on phone photos. A clear phone photo posted this week does more than a polished one that never gets taken.
- Name the dish and tag the place. Both cost nothing.
- Do not judge a photo by its likes alone. It may be doing its real work on your menu or your delivery listing.
How we did this
Public Instagram data, pulled in October 2026, from restaurants found on Google Maps that link their Instagram from their own website. Big chains were dropped before the pull. It is not a random sample, and New York makes up 51% of the feeds.
The scores are our review: we had Claude look at the 4 newest posts on each feed and rate each food photo against the scale above. That is a model's judgment, applied the same way to every photo, not a measurement. Likes leave out pinned posts, posts owned by another account, hidden likes and posts under 3 days old. The chance check is a simple test comparing the share of photos that beat their own typical post, and photos from the same restaurant are not fully independent. No restaurant is named here.
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