The secret weapon for the informed picker.

What it does

Every photo, every Michigan listing, every Sunday night.

A typical estate sale listing carries between one hundred and three hundred photos. The operator catalogs the obvious — the categories you can name from the front porch. The named pieces, the ones a collector would drive across the state for, often sit in photos seventy through two-hundred-twenty, with no description attached.

That’s the gap PixelIQ closes. Every Sunday night, our tool reads through every photo in every listing within our bureau radius. It surfaces the pieces the listing didn’t catalog by name — the maker, the era, the pattern, the condition cue — and packages them for Wednesday’s paper.

Why we built it

No operator has time to be an expert on every category.

The operator’s job is to liquidate the estate, and to do it across thirty categories an estate might contain — furniture, glass, china, tools, jewelry, books, art, militaria, kitchenware, textiles, toys, instruments, and so on. No human operator catalogs that range deep on every category. That’s not a flaw. It’s the job.

PixelIQ’s job is to add depth alongside them. The operator gets a packed sale and a fair price. The reader walks in Thursday morning knowing what to look for. The estate clears. Everyone’s working toward the same Thursday morning.

The Diamond Slate format

Five pieces per Diamond, each with the read.

Every Wednesday paper carries one Diamond — the Michigan estate sale we’d drive to ourselves. The Diamond surfaces five pieces flagged by PixelIQ, with the field intel a hunter wants in hand before the door opens.

• The piece. Maker, category, what makes it the variant that trades. e.g. Nippon porcelain, hand-painted with gilt-trim coralene work.
• The era window. The date range that distinguishes the period piece from a reproduction. e.g. Nippon backstamps used 1891–1921 only; pieces marked “Japan” are post-1921 and clear much lower.
• The pattern or color signal. The specific marker collectors look for. e.g. carnival, hobnail, opalescent. Or pink and cobalt blue Depression glass.
• The condition cue. What the photo shows that hints at A-, B-, or C-grade. e.g. visible glaze wear vs. clean factory edge.
• At the door. The single thing to physically check when you pick the piece up. e.g. flip the piece, read the backstamp; check the drawer rail for a factory mark.

A find from last week

The Cybis porcelain magnolia at Kellie’s Blue Moon.

All three pieces walked out of Kellie’s gallery over the two-day window. Issue 3 readers had the call Wednesday morning, twenty-four hours before the doors opened. The casual scroller didn’t.

Honest about what we don’t do

We don’t price the pieces.

PixelIQ surfaces the pieces. We tell you what they are, when they’re from, and what to look at when you pick them up. We don’t publish dollar values — not until we have verified completed-sale comp data for the specific maker, pattern, and era. That feed is in development; when it lands, every Diamond Slate piece will carry a 25–75 percentile comp range with the sources cited inline.

Until then: we tell you where to look. The pricing is between you, the operator, and the gavel.