Maybe the cost of getting good pictures and making longer menus is a factor. Or maybe it's just another part of the "psychology of food menu design."
...and the obligatory "items may not be exactly as shown" disclaimer would make pictures not reliable for portion sizes either.
We just need to gather as many menus as possible from all over the world. Currently Spain -Barcelona focused so far.
Some restaurants (e.g. in Japan) go even further and make actual-size, plastic models of the food. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_food#Use_by_Japanese_rest...
I do still find this a good idea.
The tasting menu is 1785 Calories -- excluding wine.
I would surmise it’s one of the reasons trycaviar.com took off the way it did. It swept people from sites like grubhub that had lower quality restaurants with no pics.
In Japan it doesn’t even end with pictures—most restaurants have realistic physical models of their dishes!
However a constant pain was the language (not a surprise) and my personal food tastes. I'll eat anything that isn't fish. Several days I'd just select random foods based on conversation with the staff, or pointing to lines on a menu because they looked fun. (That was quite fun, some days I'd get a starter, other days I'd get a desert, and I'd have no clue what I'd ordered!)
The only day I was absolutely certain I'd get great food was the day I found a place to eat that had pictures of the food. I thought I'd ordered a hamburger, but what actually arrived was a fish-cake in a bun. And that is when I learned that photo-based-menus were still not terribly useful.
If there had been a symbol of a "fish", a "cow", or a "chicken" that would have helped, but a photo can't tell you the difference between tomato-soup and chicken-soup, nor between a hamburger and a fish-cake!
Japan definitely has a great tradition of see before you eat.