Three passes over your photographs, and never a single-figure answer

What the examination is

Splitting the work into passes isn't a performance trick. A single question — “what is all this worth” — produces confident nonsense, because there's nothing stopping the answer from being invented. Asking three narrower questions in sequence, each one grounded in what actually separates a valuable object from a common one, produces something a curator would recognise.

The three passes

Then every number crosses one more layer before it reaches you. That layer is the part of this product we'd defend hardest, so it's worth spelling out.

The rules every number passes through

These are enforced in code, not asked for politely in an instruction. There are 22 tests sitting on top of them, and if one fails the product is lying to somebody about their inheritance.

• A value is always a range. There's no code path that can print a single figure. Not for an item, not for a collection, not anywhere. A point value implies a precision a photograph cannot support.
• A low-confidence item carries no number at all. It says “worth a professional look” and explains why. A made-up figure on an item we couldn't identify is the most damaging thing this product could do, in both directions: it either makes someone bin a treasure or humiliates them at a dealer's counter.
• A range too tight for its confidence gets widened. A narrow range reads as certainty, and on a middling-confidence item that certainty isn't there. So the spread is stretched to match how sure we actually are, rather than repeating a pretence.
• A collection total inherits the weakest confidence in it. One shaky item makes the whole total shaky, and the total says so. A collection with a “needs an expert” item in it is not a confident collection.
• Items we decline to value are reported separately. They're never silently counted as zero. “We don't know” and “worth nothing” are different answers, and folding the first into the second is how people throw things away.

In practice most flagged items come back with no number on them, because a photograph often can't settle what an object is well enough to price it. That's the system working rather than failing. A report with four blanks and one range in it is more use than a report with five confident figures, four of which are guesses.

The three confidence labels

Every item carries one. They're deliberately plain, because the audience isn't collectors.

Condition is the reason the middle row exists. Wear on the high points of a coin, the corners of a card, whether a record's inner sleeve is the original — these move a value further than almost anything else, and a photograph shows them imperfectly. What actually drives the value of an inherited coin collection goes through that in more detail.

Why the numbers are rounded

Below a certain size, precision is a pretence. Telling you an item is worth seven dollars rather than nine implies we can tell those apart from a photograph, and we can't, so every figure is rounded before it's displayed.

What the report contains

Six parts, the same six every time.

• The Verdict — what this collection is, in plain English.
• The Attention List — every item worth a closer look, with why.
• The Bulk Assessment — everything else, grouped and priced as lots.
• An Action Plan — what to authenticate, what to sell, and where.
• The Do-NOT list — the irreversible mistakes, before you make them.
• A printable archival PDF, and a tracker that survives the whole process.

The Do-NOT list comes near the top rather than the bottom, because it's the part that earns the fee. Cleaning a coin removes 50–90% of its value in about thirty seconds, and most people who do it are trying to make the collection presentable. What each tier covers is a short page, and the first look costs nothing.

Compared with the two obvious alternatives

The competition here isn't other software. It's a free valuation from someone who'd like to buy the collection, and a search result written by the same kind of person.

None of that makes a dealer the villain. A dealer is a legitimate buyer and a single cheque for the bulk is often the right ending. The conflict is structural: the person valuing the collection shouldn't be the person buying it. If you're settling an estate rather than clearing a parent's house, the executor's version of this covers five collections and produces something a family can look at together.

Things worth knowing before you pay

This is not a certified appraisal

It's an informational estimate from photographs. It won't be accepted for an insurance schedule, a contested estate, a charitable deduction or a court, and we won't pretend otherwise. Part of what the report does is tell you which items are worth paying a real appraiser to see in person, which is usually a much shorter list than the boxes suggest.

Who this is wrong for

Anyone who wants a single precise number. You won't get one, by design, and if that's the thing you're paying for you should keep your money. It's equally wrong for anyone who wants us to sell the collection for them. We won't, at any price, and that refusal is the only reason the rest of this is trustworthy.

What happens to your photographs

They're rotated on ingest using the orientation data the camera wrote, because roughly a third of phone photos would otherwise reach the examination sideways. They're capped at 1600 pixels on the long edge. They're stored under a path derived from a hash rather than the original filename — that filename is usually something like IMG_4471, but it's sometimes a person's name. They're served only through a signed route.

What happens when something goes wrong

If the vision provider is unreachable, the pipeline doesn't show you an error page. A deterministic fallback composes a real report out of whatever the passes did find. Somebody paid $39 and uploaded photographs of their dead parent's possessions; “something went wrong, try again later” is not an acceptable thing to hand them.

What you actually do

1. Photograph the collection where it sits

   Diffuse daylight, not flash. Both sides of anything unusual, and shoot through the plastic rather than opening a holder. The first-week checklist covers what to move and what to leave alone before you start.

2. Upload them

   Up to 5 photos on the free first look, with no account and no card. Up to 200 on the $39 report, up to 600 on the $79 estate tier.

3. Watch the tracker

   You stay on the page. Each stage writes its progress as it finishes, so you can see which pass is running and how far through it is. Two to five minutes is typical. Nothing gets posted to you and nothing needs installing.

4. Read the verdict first, then the attention list

   The verdict tells you what the collection is in a paragraph. Most of the time it's the disappointing answer, and it's better to have it in writing than to find it out slowly over six months of listings.

5. Work the action plan, and come back if things change

   Authenticate what's worth authenticating, sell what's worth selling, and leave the rest. If grading results come back or another box turns up, a re-triage rebuilds the report for $9.

This is an informational estimate from photographs, not a certified appraisal. We tell you what is worth paying an appraiser to look at — we have no interest in buying anything you own. Values are always given as ranges, and where a photograph can't settle it, the report says “worth a professional look” rather than inventing a figure.