Show HN: Should I Grade It? Estimates a Pokémon card's PSA grade from a photo(shouldigradeit.app)
3 points by mjprintz 1 day ago | 3 comments
[–] tomshafer 1 day ago
Cool idea. Does glare or photo angle change the estimate much? Centering and corner wear are hard to judge from a phone shot, so I'd be curious how it copes with that.
[–] mjprintz 1 hour ago
One shot would be impossible. It uses 3 main pictures, one straight on picture, one picture of the back, and one picture of the front of the card on an angle. Using these 3 its able to identify the exact centering, edge wear, and surface scratches that are going to affect grading and give you a fairly accurate grade. I've used it on a few PSA submissions myself and so far I am very happy with its correlation to the grades on the cards i got back.
Should I Grade It? takes a photo of a card, identifies it, estimates the PSA grade, and pulls the raw price from TCGplayer plus recent eBay sales at each grade. Then it does the sum using the PSA tier the card's value requires, since a $5,000 card can't go through a tier capped at $500.
How it works:
The measurement runs client-side with canvas: find the card, warp it flat, measure the borders for centering (PSA publishes the limits, 55/45 for a 10), and check the back for corner and edge whitening. An optional tilted photo is used to look for surface scratches.
The front photo goes through a Cloudflare Worker to CardSight AI for identification. Prices come from TCGCSV, a mirror of TCGplayer's catalog, and graded sales from PokemonPriceTracker. The app is a single HTML file with no framework; the Worker also renders about 25,000 card price pages from KV.
There's an inspector where you can drag the measuring lines yourself if you don't trust the automatic ones.
Limitations: it's an estimate from photos, not a grade. Centering works best on yellow-bordered cards; full-art cards with thin silver borders often can't be measured automatically, and it says so rather than guessing. Corner sharpness can't really be judged from a flat photo, only whitening.
Free use is 7 scans a month, and there's a paid tier for unlimited scans. The centering tool and grading calculator are free with no limit.
I'd especially like feedback on the measurement approach (glare and perspective are the hard parts), and from anyone who has sent cards to PSA on whether the estimates match what came back.