Reading a surplus lot from its photos: the identification pipeline
TL;DR Resale is the hobby that funds the hobby, and the expensive mistake in it is not a bad price. It is a confident wrong model number, because everything downstream (comps, margin, bid ceiling) is built on it. Auction search results give you one thumbnail and a title the seller typed in a hurry. The real information is in the gallery: wide shots for counting, close-ups for labels. The pipeline is split on purpose: vision reads the lot, a comps step prices what was read, and plain deterministic arithmetic turns that into a number. The model never does the math. Fetching the full gallery moved make/model accuracy from 0.375 to 0.875 on a 24-lot hand-labelled bench. That is the single biggest lever I have found, bigger than any model swap. Most of what went wrong later was not misreading a badge. It was counting and itemizing: accessories sold as products, “X with Y” counted twice, a screen size parsed as a quantity. A final sanitizer can only tighten a verdict. And if the gallery fetch fails, the lot is deferred, not guessed. I wrote about how lots get found in the first place. This post is about the step after: given a lot that looks interesting, how do I know what is actually in the pile? ...