Top 10 Food Shots From Foodspotting’s 1st Year [PICS]

It’s the first birthday of Foodspotting, an iPhone photo app and website that concentrates on pictures of the foods available at restaurants, rather than the restaurants themselves.

The app’s official launch was a year ago today (January 15), and since then, it’s collected 250,000 images of dish recommendations. This week, Foodspotting received $3 million in funding from BlueRun Ventures, and over the past year has enjoyed 550,000 downloads of its app and 300,000 visitors to its website each month. It’s released a beta version of its Android app, and boasts partnerships with household names such as the Travel Channel, Whole Foods and Zagat.

In addition, Foodspotting offered us a fun fact: Half its 7-person team has a food-related last name, such as Grub, Cao (pronounced “Chow”) and Tang.

The location-based app finds pics of foods available nearby, beckoning users with their steamy goodness, or repelling them with their grossness — either way, users get a good look at what they’ll eat, rather than reading a menu and taking their chances. And, the app can snap iPhone pics, encouraging users to leave evidence for those who are wondering what dishes are served in a restaurant.

Foodspotting calls January 15 “World Foodspotting Day,” with more than 100 meetups all over the planet. Find one near you, and if you contribute a pic of a cake, you’ll get a birthday badge.

In the meantime, let’s feast our eyes on Foodspotting’s Top 10 greatest hits, the 10 most popular foods photographed by users of the Foodspotting iPhone app, here in all their mouth-watering goodness: