How AI identification works

The vault uses a two-stage AI identification pipeline. The goal is sub-five-second results on common cards with a graceful fallback for anything unusual.

Stage 1 — CardSight

Every uploaded card photo is sent to CardSight, a purpose-built card-identification model trained on tens of millions of card images. CardSight returns:

• Set name and code (e.g. "Crown Zenith — CRZ")
• Player or character (e.g. "Charizard VMAX")
• Card number within set (e.g. "20/20")
• Variant (e.g. "Alt Art" / "Reverse Holo")
• Year
• A confidence score from 0 to 1

If confidence is above our threshold (currently 0.85), the vault accepts the result and writes it to the card row. The card's workflow status moves from imported → identified.

Stage 2 — Gemini Flash fallback

If CardSight's confidence is below threshold, or if it returns no result at all, the vault falls back to Gemini Flash with a structured prompt asking for the same fields. Gemini handles cards CardSight struggles with — vintage sets pre-2000, regional releases, error variants, custom proxies (which it correctly identifies as such).

Gemini returns a confidence score too. If both pipelines fail to clear the threshold the card lands in Inventory → Needs review for manual identification.

What gets sent where

Photos are uploaded to our S3-compatible object store. CardSight and Gemini receive presigned URLs to those photos — not the photo bytes themselves. The presigned URLs are scoped to single-use and expire within minutes.

Our Privacy Policy lists every external service we send photos to.

Why two stages

CardSight is purpose-built for cards and cheap to run, so it handles 95%+ of modern requests in under a second. Gemini is more general and more expensive, so we only invoke it when CardSight is uncertain. The split keeps costs predictable while preserving accuracy on the long tail.

Override is always one click

The AI is right almost all the time, but when it isn't, you don't have to dig through edit forms. On any card detail page the identification block has an Edit identification button that opens the same fields in a quick-edit panel. See Manual identification.