Common scan problems and how to avoid them

Most scans that come back vague or plainly wrong have one of a handful of causes. Here is how to recognise them and what to do instead.

Photos you did not take yourself

If someone sends you a photo to check, you inherit whatever their lighting and camera did. You cannot fix that after the fact.

Ask for what you would want yourself: even light, a neutral background, one object, a sharp close-up of any stamp, and the weight from a scale. It feels like a lot to ask. It is less work than talking through a result that was never going to be reliable.

Metals other than yellow gold

IsItGOLD? looks at gold, silver, platinum and palladium. White and rose alloys, plating and mixed pieces are harder to read from a photo than plain yellow gold, because the visual cues that separate them are subtler.

This is where context earns its keep. A stamp, a weight, and a note about where the piece came from often do more for a difficult alloy than another photo would.

Natural gold, ore and finds

If you are holding a rock rather than a ring, be aware of a real limitation: telling gold from pyrite in a photograph is genuinely hard, and a value range calculated from a rock's apparent metal content is not something to rely on. Treat an ore result as a starting point for a physical test, not as a number.

Photograph the specimen close and sharp, from several angles, with even light. A magnifier or a macro lens helps for fine, scattered gold. Say in the description that it is ore or a natural find, and where it came from.

The feedback buttons

Every result carries a thumbs up and thumbs down. Please use them — they tell us which results are going wrong and are how problems like the ones above get prioritised.

To be straight about what they do not do: they do not retrain the model, and they do not tune the app to you personally. They are a signal to us, not a learning loop.

You need a connection

The analysis runs in the cloud, so a scan needs internet access to complete. Scans do keep running in the background, so you can leave the screen — but if you are somewhere without coverage, expect to wait until you are not.

The short version

• Even light, no glare
• One object per scan, several angles of it
• A readable photo of every stamp
• A weight from a scale
• An honest description, with the unknowns left as unknown

And for anything where the answer carries real money: have the item independently tested. The app is here to tell you whether that is worth your time.