Ten kitchens, one photograph
The tenth kitchen in a hall selling fries should not pay to look up a picture of fries. Keyed properly, a photo library gets cheaper for everyone the more people use it.
Food halls repeat themselves. Not the good dishes — the ordinary ones. Fries, halloumi, a chicken burger, a brownie. Across a dozen vendors the same handful of items turns up again and again, which is the whole reason a hall works: enough variety to argue about, enough overlap that nobody starves.
That repetition costs money in a place nobody looks: every kitchen searching separately for a photograph of the same thing.
Once for the whole platform
So a dish is looked up once. When a photograph is found for a dish, it is recorded against a key built from the dish's name and its section, and the next kitchen anywhere on the platform selling the same thing is handed it for free — no search, nothing spent, and a picture another operator has already looked at and accepted.
The key does real work. Word order is thrown away, so "cheese burger" and "burger cheese" are the same dish. The section comes along, because a wrap in Sides and a wrap in Mains are not reliably the same photograph. And chips and fries are deliberately not merged — plenty of kitchens mean different things by those, and quietly deciding otherwise on their behalf is exactly the sort of clever that produces a wrong menu.
What it costs, before it costs it
A kitchen onboarding two hundred items sees the arithmetic before pressing anything: how many need looking up, how many are already in the library and free, how many are branded and will be left alone. A button that quietly spends money is not something anybody can agree to.
The free half is one button. The lookups are not, and that is deliberate. Accepting twelve photographs another kitchen already chose is safe, because a person looked at each of them. Auto-picking thirty pictures nobody has ever seen and putting them on a live menu is a completely different act, and dressing them up as the same button would hide that.
One reject, everybody
If a picture is wrong, it is wrong on every menu showing it. So reporting one replaces it for everyone — behind a required reason, and with a hard stop after three replacements, because a picture that has been swapped three times does not need a fourth attempt, it needs a human to look at it.