Adding items

How something in your cupboard becomes an item Auto Prepped knows about.

Status. The capture screen is on the site, under Capture in the header. There is also a way to add an item without a camera, by searching the catalogue or typing the name.

Two photographs per item

1. Photograph the barcode. One shot, the barcode filling a good part of the frame. Auto Prepped reads it and looks the product up in its catalogue. If the barcode cannot be read, or the product is not known, you are offered a search instead of a dead end.
2. Photograph the printed date. The "best before" or "use by" line on the tin, packet or bottle.

Six identical tins are one pair of photographs and a count. Take the photographs in this order; the site asks for them in this order.

What is done with the date

Auto Prepped does not yet read dates from photographs. It will, once a reading engine has been chosen and tested against real labels; the choice has not been made, because a confident wrong date is the worst mistake this product could make. Until then:

• you read the date from the photograph and enter it;
• if you do not, the item is given an estimated date from the product's typical shelf life for the place you keep it, and it is shown as an estimate everywhere it appears, with the place it assumes.

A date you read from the pack is final. It replaces the estimate, and nothing replaces it afterwards.

Every date carries two things beside it, always:

• Its precision. A label that says "11 2027" gives a month, and the product records a month. It never invents a day.
• Where it came from. Read from the label, confirmed by you, estimated, or entered by hand. The words are shown next to every date, and estimated dates look different as well.

Use by and best before are never merged. Use by is a safety instruction; best before is about quality. The product asks which one the label says and keeps the answer.

Quantity, location and status

Each item has a quantity and a unit, a storage location (the garage, the loft, the cupboard under the stairs), and a status: available, opened, used, discarded, or past its date and waiting for you to decide. Logging an item as used can be undone. Items that pass their date are flagged, not deleted.

Every list you see is organised by where things are kept: cupboard or pantry, then refrigerated, then frozen. An item goes by its location where the location says (the fridge, the freezer), otherwise by what the catalogue knows of the product; anything the site cannot place is listed last under "Not yet sorted", and giving it a location or a catalogue entry sorts it.

Moving something to the freezer

Each item has a Move control that lists your places. Moving an item whose date is an estimate to somewhere colder or warmer, the fridge to the freezer say, re-estimates it for the new place, counted from the day you added it (or opened it), and tells you so: "Re-estimated for the freezer". The estimate for a fresh item in the freezer is the usual home freezing life for its kind, months rather than days, and it is still an estimate, marked as one. Moving an item whose date came from the pack changes nothing about the date: the label is the final word. The item notes that it is kept frozen while the label assumed the fridge, so you can decide for yourself what that means.

What is kept from the photograph

The barcode, the date candidates and the record that a photograph was taken. The photograph itself is kept for a stated number of days and then deleted, unless you have asked otherwise. Your photographs has the details.