What did
you find?
Identify antiques and odd finds from a photo. Add the mark, label, or inscription that makes yours different, then see what it might resell for.
Some things need
more than a guess.
Curiosity is already there. WIW gives it somewhere to go before the moment disappears. Have a conversation with your expert and keep exploring until the picture gets clearer.
It identifies what it can
Start with the object in front of you. Here: an 1882 German Lutheran confirmation certificate, read off a single photograph — script, date and all.
It shows what still matters
If a mark, an edition, an inscription or a condition detail could change the answer, it says so rather than pricing past it.
Then you keep exploring
Turn it over. Add a photograph. Share what you know. Ask another question — the answer moves with the evidence.
We started with an object.
Then things got interesting.
Have a conversation with your expert. A question, a second photograph, a mark on the bottom — and the estimate changes.
Start with the object
A multi-figure porcelain sculpture on a wooden base. Recognizable, but the first photograph can’t answer everything that matters.
Your expert knows what to ask
Turn it over. Is there a brand, model number or date? How tall is it? The right details can change the answer.
You send back a clue
A photograph of the underside reveals an inscription, maker information, and another piece of the puzzle.
The estimate gets sharper
Better evidence. Better comps. A narrower range. Keep talking and the answer keeps improving.
Everything on the table.
Estate sales. Flea markets. Antique shops. Garages. Attics. The things worth stopping for — each one a one-page find.
20 on the table, in 7 categories
Curious about the object.
Honest about the money.
The Full Breakdown shows a resale estimate alongside current online asking prices. See how the condition, edition, and details of your item could change the range.
A fascinating object can still be worth very little. WIW will tell you that too.
Watch it think.
Watch an earlier app scan take a boxed Michael Jackson figure from identification to Full Breakdown. Today, the app shows current asking prices alongside its resale estimate.
Objects with stories.
Nobody at the sale could read it
Five dollars for an East Syriac book in a Madison Heights garage, out of a library stamped Sacred Heart Seminary, with a chapter of the Mishnah folded inside it. The book turned out to be the smaller find.
A worn H.J. Wehman song sheet does not preserve Napoleon's words. It preserves something stranger: the invented Napoleon ordinary people could buy, sing, collect and eventually ask an app to identify.
An 1862 book scores several hundred New York merchants on what they died worth. It took a while to notice that the author is in there too, under a false name, in the third person, with his column left empty.
Longfellow opens Hiawatha by asking who told him the story, and answers with a singer he invented. The real answer is an Ojibwe woman who published in a handwritten magazine under a name she made up, and who was dead thirteen years before the poem made her material famous.
A small green guide promised trees and shrubs. It opened into maps, vanished reservoirs, surviving elms, a suspicious yellowwood and the unsettling fact that Central Park has never stood still.
An 1882 wedding greeting inside a wreath a grandmother built by hand, a boy's 1873 confirmation certificate in an oval frame, twenty-five dollars for the pair. I went looking for a bride and groom and found somebody else entirely.
A harmless-looking 1854 fishing book opens into a Victorian doctor-priest, edible mushrooms, Roman fish sauce, luxury ponds, bad medicine and the question of what curiosity is for.
Twenty-one young men, a lettered sweater, an old frame. We’re still working through what can actually be established.
Know what to look for.
Get better at the hunt. Follow your curiosity, learn which details matter, and know when an object deserves a closer look.
All guides →Take the rabbit hole with you.
The interesting stuff never waits until you get home. At the sale, in the shop, or digging through a box — your expert goes with you.
The pages were brittle and the script was unfamiliar. The first answer was a name, not a number.
A little expert
in your pocket.
The next time something makes you stop and wonder, take your expert with you.