The photo has to be the dish

I want to look back at a small decision we made while building the website. We had pages for six dishes, but some of the pictures were missing. A photo beside a dish name does more than decorate a page. It tells a customer what they may actually receive from Cindy’s kitchen.

I asked our AI agent to help find and place photographs. The rule was simple: use real pictures of our own food and keep the original marks on them. It checked the photos we already had and looked through Cindy’s older Facebook material, tracing each possible match back to its source.

That worked for several dishes. We kept reliable pictures for Nyonya kuih and curry puffs, and found suitable originals for Assam laksa and bak kut teh. The agent could put them into the right pages and the homepage directory, then check that they loaded properly.

Two gaps were harder. For nasi lemak with curry chicken, a picture of a version with different accompaniments would have looked plausible but described the wrong plate. For bak zang, a poster was not the same as a clear, standalone photograph of the food. The agent left those spaces unresolved and told me what it could not verify.

I supplied the matching original photos for those last two dishes. The agent added them to the correct pages and directory, kept the source images and watermarks intact, and checked the published pages. That completed the six pages without filling the gaps with a near match.

We use fictional illustrations for this diary, and I enjoy those. A product photo has a different job. It should show the food we actually make. AI made the search and page work easier, but the useful habit was knowing when to stop, ask for the right photo and let the real dish speak for itself.