Phone in. Reel out.

Welcome to socialdish

You're running a restaurant. We get it, service is at 7, the dishwasher just broke, the new server forgot the specials. The last thing you have time for is a content plan.

That's our entire job. socialdish takes a phone photo of any dish and ships back a cinematic image, a short video, a ready-to-post caption with hashtags, and an alt-text accessibility line, all in your brand voice, all in under two minutes.

One photo in. One month of content out.

This guidebook is everything you need to get the most out of your subscription. Read it once. Bookmark it. Hand it to your marketing manager. You'll be shipping content like a Michelin restaurant's creative team by tomorrow.

Quickstart in 3 steps

1. Sign in. Go to socialdish.ae/signin. Continue with Google. (Takes ~10 seconds; we never see your password.)
2. Onboard. Tell us your restaurant name, cuisine, city, and pick a brand voice (Confident, Warm, Quiet Luxury, or Playful). Three quick screens. Done.
3. Generate your first piece. Hit Generate from the dashboard. Drop a phone photo of a dish. Watch the AI plate it. Download, copy the caption, post.

That's the entire onboarding loop. Most subscribers generate their first cinematic image within 3 minutes of signing up, including the time it takes the AI to render.

Photo prep, what to upload

The AI is good. The right input photo makes it great.

What works

• Phone photos taken with the dish well-lit. Window light is your friend. Natural daylight beats anything.
• The whole plate visible.Don't crop the garnish off.
• One dish, one plate. Multi-dish flat-lays are harder for the AI to reason about.
• Slightly off-angle. Pure overhead works, but a 30-45° angle gives the AI more depth to enhance.
• Any quality.Bad lighting, motion blur, half-eaten plate, we work with what you've got. (But the better the input, the more "magic" we have to preserve.)

What doesn't

• Hands or people in frame, most AI engines refuse to render humans accurately and will distort them.
• Heavy filters already applied. Send the raw photo from your camera roll, not a Lightroom export.
• Screenshots of other people's photos. Copyright matters; we'll flag it.

Pro tip: shoot 3-5 angles of every new menu item the day it launches. Upload your favorite. Save the rest for variant generations later in the week.

Setting your brand voice

During onboarding you picked one of four voice presets. You can change it anytime under Dashboard → Settings → Brand profile.

Style notes (advanced)

The Brand style notes field is where you make the AI sound like you. Examples that work:

We always plate on dark slate. Avoid stock-photo vibes. Lean into texture, never overstyled. Steam and grain are good.

We're a third-wave coffee shop in Karama. Customers are regulars. Voice is friendly, knowledgeable, never snobby. Always mention farm origin when known.

These notes get injected into every prompt, image generation, captions, hashtags. Take 5 minutes to write 2-3 sentences. It makes everything we ship dramatically more on-brand.

Generating cinematic photos

The two-step flow

1. From the dashboard, hit + Generate.
2. Drag-drop your phone photo (or click to browse). JPG, PNG, WEBP, or HEIC up to 12 MB.
3. Wait 30-60 seconds while the AI works. You'll see a processing screen with messages like "Re-lighting the plate…", those aren't fake, the AI literally is doing those things.
4. Side-by-side before/after appears. Caption is below.
5. Downloadthe after image (right click or use the Download button). It's yours forever, in your library.

Image presets, what to expect

The AI applies these production values automatically:

• Lighting: soft directional from camera-left, warm 3200K key with cool fill. Deep, controlled shadows.
• Color grade: rich saturated reds and ambers, deep background, creamy mid-tones. Bon Appétit cover energy.
• Detail: visible micro-texture, sesame seeds, sear marks, condensation. Steam where appropriate.
• Depth: shallow focus, background dissolved.
• Crop: 4:5 portrait, Instagram-ready out of the box.

Re-generating

Don't love the result? Hit Try another and upload again. AI is stochastic, second attempts often surface a better result. Each regeneration counts toward your monthly quota.

Generating video reels

Ad reels are included on every paid plan: 3 a month on Starter, 8 on Growth, 30 on Studio. From the dashboard, open Create ad.

How it works

1. Upload a hero shot of the dish (the same kind of photo you'd use for image gen).
2. Optional: add a motion direction in the textarea, e.g. "slow camera dolly toward the dish, soft steam rising".
3. Wait 30-90 seconds. The AI renders a 9:16 video optimized for Reels and TikTok.
4. Preview, download, post.

What to expect

• Length: 6 seconds on Seedance, 10 on Omni flash.
• Aspect: 9:16 vertical, fits Reels and TikTok natively.
• Motion: camera moves (slow dolly, orbit, or push-in). Subject elements move subtly (steam, glints, garnish settle).
• No audio. Add music when you post, TikTok and Reels both let you overlay trending audio.

Captions, hashtags & alt text

Every generated photo and video ships with three pieces of ready-to-post copy:

The caption

2-3 sentences in your brand voice. Always ends with a soft CTA ("Counter seats go first") or scarcity hook ("Wednesday's omakase, 12 seats only"). Click Copy to grab caption + hashtags together.

Hashtags

5-7 hashtags mixing dish-specific (#cacioepepe), location (#dubaifood), and community (#myDXB). Lowercase, no spaces. Hand-tuned for the UAE market when relevant.

Alt text (accessibility)

One factual sentence describing what's literally in the frame. Paste this into Instagram's "Advanced settings → Alt text" when posting. It's the right thing to do, and Instagram's algorithm rewards accessibility-tagged posts with broader reach.

Building a posting rhythm

What works for most kitchens: batch a week in one sitting. Shoot five or six dishes on your phone during a quiet hour, run them through Generate, and you will have a week of photos, captions, and one or two ad reels sitting in your Library.

A rhythm worth copying: hero dish at the start of the week, behind-the-pass or chef moment midweek, the reel on your busiest ordering day, and something seasonal or promotional at the weekend. Post from your Library whenever suits your service.

Publishing to platforms

Today, the workflow is one click + one paste:

1. Tap Copy on the caption (also copies hashtags).
2. Download the image or video.
3. Open Instagram / TikTok / Talabat dashboard / wherever you post.
4. Paste caption, attach asset, post.

Total time: under 60 seconds per post. We're working on one-click auto-posting (see What's coming below).

What we're working on

• Instagram auto-publishing, submitting captions and assets straight to your Instagram Business account.
• TikTok scheduling, the same flow plus trending sound suggestions.
• Google Business Profile, auto-updating your listing with fresh hero images.

None of these are live yet, and we will not put a date on them until they are close. Zomato, Talabat and Noon have no public posting API at all, so those stay copy-and-paste for now.

Your subscription

Change plan anytime from Settings → Billing → Open billing portal. Upgrade prorates immediately; downgrade takes effect at next billing cycle.

Cancel anytime. No annual contracts, no cancellation fee. Your assets remain available for 90 days after cancellation in case you want to come back.

Delivery-app content (Zomato, Talabat, Noon)

The biggest single ROI for most restaurants is replacing the dim, evening-shift menu photos on Talabat, Zomato, and Noon Food. Customers scrolling at 11pm hungry don't order what looks bad. They order what stops the thumb.

The playbook

1. Open your delivery-app menu. Sort menu items by sales rank.
2. Take the bottom-quartile photos (worst-performing items) and run them through socialdish.
3. Replace the menu photo on Zomato/Talabat/Noon with the new version.
4. Wait 7 days. Measure the lift. (Most restaurants see 15-40% conversion uplift on swapped items.)
5. Repeat for the next quartile.

Sizing

Delivery-app menu photos use different aspect ratios. We generate at 4:5 (Instagram portrait) by default; you can crop to the delivery-app spec in any free tool. Common specs:

• Zomato: 1024×1024 (1:1)
• Talabat: 1280×720 (16:9 landscape)
• Noon Food: 1024×768 (4:3)

Seasonal & Ramadan playbook

Seasonality matters more in the UAE/GCC than almost anywhere. Ramadan, Eid, National Day, Valentine's Day, summer slowdown, each is a content beat to ship a planned campaign around.

How to ask socialdish for a seasonal campaign

From Generate, add a season hint to your style notes:

Ramadan iftar campaign, focus on the 7pm shareables, the shorbat, the family platters. Voice is warm, communal, generous.

The AI will weight Ramadan-appropriate dish descriptions and use hashtags like #iftardubai and #ramadanmajlis.

Seasonal beats to plan

• Ramadan, 30-day campaign, iftar & suhoor focus, shareable platters
• Eid, celebratory dishes, family reservations push
• UAE National Day (Dec 2), UAE-flag color palettes, heritage dishes
• Valentine's, date-night vignettes, dessert for two
• Summer (Jun, Aug), cold dishes, indoor AC promise, weekend brunch rotation

FAQ

Will the AI change what my dish looks like?

On the premium engine (Gemini), we're strict: the AI is instructed to preserve the exact dish, plating, garnishes, and composition, only re-light and re-grade. On the free engine (Pollinations FLUX), the AI may "re-imagine" the dish in the same style, useful for demo, less faithful for menu replacements.

Can I generate content for multiple locations?

Today: one location per account. Multi-location support is on the roadmap without a date on it yet. For now, restaurant groups should email Moe@bmotion.ai for a custom enterprise plan.

Who owns the generated content?

You do. Every asset socialdish generates from your photo is yours to use commercially, share, sell, or modify. We don't claim rights to your output. (We do reserve the right to use anonymized before/after pairs in our marketing, you can opt out in Settings.)

Can I use socialdish output in paid ads?

Yes. The output is yours. Run it as a Meta ad, a TikTok ad, a Google ad, or print it on a billboard.

Does the AI work with my cuisine?

We've tested socialdish with Italian, Japanese, Modern American, Levantine, Indian, Mexican, specialty coffee, and bakery/desserts. If your cuisine isn't represented well, email us a 5-dish sample and we'll tune the prompts.

What happens if I cancel?

Your subscription stops at the end of the current billing period. You keep access to everything you've generated for 90 days. After that, your assets remain in cold storage, email Moe@bmotion.ai to retrieve them.

Troubleshooting

The generation failed with a quota error

You've hit your monthly limit. Check Dashboard → Overview for current usage. Upgrade from Settings → Billing, or wait until your billing cycle resets.

The result doesn't look like my dish

Every account uses the premium engine first, and it edits your actual photograph. When that engine is briefly unavailable we fall back to one that redraws the dish from a description, and we label that result as a re-imagining rather than passing it off as an edit. If you see that label, try again in a few minutes. There is no engine to switch by hand.

The video is taking forever

Seedance 2.0 typically takes 30-90 seconds. Omni flash takes about 40. Don't close the tab, we poll the model and update the moment it's ready. If it's been over 5 minutes, the model probably failed silently; refresh and try again. Failed generations don't count against your quota.

I can't sign in

Make sure you're using the same Google account you signed up with. If you used Apple Sign-in or email, you'll need to use that. Email Moe@bmotion.ai if you're truly stuck.

The caption doesn't sound like my brand

Update your brand voice preset in Settings, and especially fill in the Brand style notes field. Two or three sentences of guidance dramatically changes the output.

Getting help

We're a small team and we read every message. Direct line:

• Product support: Moe@bmotion.ai (we aim to reply within one business day)
• Billing: Moe@bmotion.ai
• Founder Circle members: Moe@bmotion.ai , goes straight to the founders

Welcome aboard. Now go cook something worth photographing.