No PDF? Snap a photo. Photo menu upload just shipped.

Quick update for everyone running ShiftTrained: you can now upload a phone photo of your menu and we'll build the training quiz from it. PDF still works — but if you don't have a PDF, you're not stuck anymore.

Here's why this matters.

When I'd talk to operators about ShiftTrained, the conversation would sometimes hit a wall: "Sounds great, but my menu's printed. We don't have a digital copy." That's most independent restaurants. Your menu lives in InDesign on the designer's laptop, or as a printout from two seasons ago, or as a laminated thing the kitchen taped to the wall. Asking the GM to hunt down the original PDF is friction that kills momentum before training even starts.

Now: snap a photo with your phone. Upload it. AI reads it.

We tested this on Fat Tommy's full food menu — same source, parsed both ways. The phone-photo version pulled out 71 items across 10 sections, with allergen info on 94% of items, prices on 100%, and variant pricing on 12%. The PDF parse, run on the same menu weeks earlier, hit 88% allergens, 94% prices, 7% variants.

Read that again: the photo path beat the PDF path on three of four quality metrics. AI vision has gotten that good.

A few practical tips when you're shooting:

• Fill the frame with the menu page. No table edges, no glare from a candle.
• Even lighting. Shoot in the morning before service, not under dim dining-room sconces.
• One page at a time. If your menu is 8 pages, that's 8 uploads. Each gets its own quiz potential.
• Keep it under 3.5MB raw size. Most iPhones default to that range automatically. If your photo is bigger, drop the resolution in Camera settings.
• Avoid handwritten cursive specials boards for now — printed text parses cleanly, scrawled chalk less so. Print your specials and snap that.

This is one of the changes that, for a lot of you, removes the last reason to not get started. If you've been holding off because "I don't have a menu PDF" — that's no longer a real reason.

Same flow as always: Dashboard → Menus → drag in your photo → review → Generate Questions. Done in ten minutes.

Have a great day! — Terry