How much is this worth?

How accurate is a photo valuation?

Honestly: accurate enough to tell you whether something is worth five dollars or five hundred, and not accurate enough to price a specific item for sale without checking. That distinction matters, because those two jobs are what people actually need and only the first can be done from a photograph.

The first job is triage, and it is where an automated estimate earns its place. Faced with a loft full of boxes, the useful question is not what each item is worth but which ten per cent of it deserves any further attention. A photograph answers that reliably: it separates the common from the possibly-interesting, it tells you which categories in the pile have collapsed in value and which have not, and it stops you spending a weekend researching a dinner service that nobody wants.

The second job is pricing a specific item, and that needs things a photograph cannot supply. Centering measured to the millimetre on a card. Whether a watch dial is original or refinished. Whether a signature is genuine. Whether a mechanism runs. Whether the maker’s mark under a vase is period or a later homage. In every category where significant money is involved, the final answer comes from completed sales of the same version in the same condition, and for anything widely faked, from somebody holding it.

That is why every result here gives a range rather than a number, states a confidence level, lists the specific things you should go and check, and links straight to sold listings. A narrow range with high confidence means the item is common and easy to identify. A wide range with low confidence is not a failure of the estimate — it is the estimate telling you the item is hard to place from what it can see, which is itself worth knowing before you price it.