Curio support

Five things account for almost every poor result:

Light it from the side, not from above. Overhead light flattens exactly the surface detail - lettering, tool marks, mould seams, wear - that the model reads. A window at 45 degrees beats a ceiling bulb every time.

Fill the frame. Get close enough that the object occupies most of the picture. A coin in the middle of a worktop is mostly worktop.

Use a plain, contrasting background. A tea towel is fine. A patterned surface is not.

Hold still and let it focus. Blur destroys more identifications than anything else, and the app will warn you before it spends a scan on a soft photo.

Fill in the extra photo slots. The back, the base, the maker’s mark, the spine - those are where the identifying evidence usually is. Skipping the optional slots caps how confident the result can be, which is why the app keeps offering them.

Because the answer is rarely on the side you photographed first. A cast iron pan is identified from the base, a book from the title page and the number line, a coin from both faces, a piece of glass from the pontil mark underneath.

You can skip the optional slots and still get a result, but the app will cap the confidence band rather than pretend that one angle told it everything. It only ever counts as one scan no matter how many slots you fill.

Your collection does - browsing, searching, editing notes, totals, and export all work with no connection, because the database is on your phone.

Scanning does not. Identification runs on a model that lives on a server, so a new scan needs a connection. If you scan while offline the item is saved as pending and the app finishes it automatically the next time it can reach the network.

We do not publish an accuracy percentage, and we would be suspicious of any app in this category that does. There is no honest single number across every item, in every condition, photographed on every kitchen table, and the figure you see on competing store listings is a marketing decision rather than a measurement.

What we do instead is show you our uncertainty on every result. A high band means the model found clear, specific evidence in your photo. A medium band means it is plausible but something was ambiguous, and you get alternatives with the feature that tells them apart. A low band means we will not name it at all.

In practice: common, well-marked, well-photographed items are identified reliably. Worn, unmarked, unusual, or badly lit items are where it struggles, and the confidence band is designed to tell you which of those you are looking at before you rely on the answer.

Because a confident wrong answer is worse than no answer, and this is the one place where most apps in this category quietly choose wrong.

When the model’s confidence falls below our threshold, Curio stops rather than picking the closest thing it can think of. You get specific capture advice instead - which angle, which mark to get in frame, more light - and the option to save the item as unidentified and come back to it.

It is worth being straight about the cost: a refusal still uses one of your scans, because we still paid to look at the photo. We think spending one scan on "not sure" is a better deal than being told something plausible and wrong about an object you were about to sell.

Yes, in two ways. On the result card you can pick one of the listed alternatives, or type your own label. Either one updates the item in your collection immediately - your collection reflects what you know, not what we guessed.

You can also tap "this is wrong" to send us the correction. That sends the result we gave, what you say it actually is, and the image fingerprint. No photo, no notes, nothing about you. It goes into the set we test model changes against, which is the only way an app like this gets better over time.

Sending a correction is entirely optional and the app works exactly the same if you never do.

Because a single number would be a lie told precisely. The same object in two conditions can be worth ten times as much or a tenth as much, and no photograph settles which of those you have.

A range with a stated source is an honest description of what we know. A point value is a claim about what your specific object is worth, and we are not in a position to make that claim about something we have only seen a picture of.

Every range tells you where it came from - recent completed sales, published guide pricing, or the model’s own estimate - and the date it was produced, so you can weigh it accordingly.

Because we could not find a basis we trust, and an invented range is worse than an empty field.

That usually means one of three things: the item is too rare for meaningful comparable sales to exist, it is too generic for the sales data to be about your object in particular, or the identification itself was not confident enough for a value to mean anything hung off it.

It does not mean the item is worthless. It means we do not know, and items with no estimate are held out of your collection total and counted separately so they never quietly drag the number around.

No, and this is the most important answer on the page. Curio is a reference tool. It is not an appraisal, it is not an authentication, and it is not a professional grade. It produces nothing an insurer, a grading service, a customs officer, a probate court, or an auction house will accept as evidence.

It has never handled your object. It cannot weigh it, feel its edges, test its metal, look under the patina, or spot a good forgery - and forgeries are precisely where a photograph-based tool is least reliable, because the more an item is worth, the more motivated the fake.

If money, insurance, tax, an estate, or a dispute turns on the answer, have a qualified specialist look at the object in person. Curio is a good way to decide whether that is worth doing.

You can use it to decide where to look, and you should be careful about using it to decide what to pay.

Where it genuinely helps: triaging a box of unknowns at a car boot sale, working out whether the thing in your loft is worth photographing properly, spotting which items in a lot deserve a closer look, and getting a rough sense of scale before you talk to a dealer.

Where it does not: any transaction where being wrong costs you real money. The honest caveat is that the app is at its weakest exactly where the stakes are highest - unusual, valuable, or possibly-faked items, and condition differences you cannot see in a photo but a buyer will see in the hand.

Rule of thumb from us, and we would rather say it than have you find out: if the amount at stake matters to you, treat a Curio result as the reason to get a second opinion, not as the second opinion.

Your device shrinks the picture and strips its metadata - including GPS coordinates - before anything leaves the phone. The original stays with you.

The stripped copy is sent over an encrypted connection, read by the vision model, and deleted as soon as the answer comes back. We do not keep the image, it is never written to a long-term store, and it is never used to train anything.

What we keep is the fingerprint of the image and the text of the result, in the shared cache. If you save the item, your own full-resolution photo is stored on your phone and only on your phone.

That cache is also why some answers come back instantly: if someone has already scanned a visually identical item, the fingerprint matches and your photo is never uploaded at all. The fingerprint describes the picture, not you, and there is no way to work out from it who scanned what.

No, and there is no way to make one. Curio has no sign-up, no password, no email field, and no profile.

The app does sign your installation in to Firebase anonymously, which produces a random identifier with nothing attached to it. Its only job is counting scans, so the free allowance and the fair-use caps can be enforced somewhere they cannot be edited. It is not linked to your Apple ID or Google account and it does not follow you to another device.

You can erase it and everything attached to it at any time from Settings > Privacy > Delete my data.

Curio does not use your photos for training. Production model providers must also contractually exclude Curio photos from training before live scanning is enabled.

The only thing that ever feeds back into improving the app is a correction you deliberately send us, and that carries the result text and your correction - not your photograph.

It is gone, and we cannot get it back for you. This is the flip side of never uploading it: there is no server copy to restore from, because we never made one.

So please export. Settings > Export gives you JSON for item records, folders and notes, plus CSV for a spreadsheet or insurer. Photo files are not embedded, so keep separate copies of any pictures you need. Put the export somewhere you control - a cloud drive, an email to yourself, anywhere that is not just this phone.

If your device backs itself up to iCloud or Google, the app’s data may be included in that backup under their terms. That is worth having, but it is theirs rather than ours, so we would not rely on it alone.

Do this today rather than the day you drop the phone in a canal. It takes about ten seconds.

You can install it anywhere, but nothing syncs. Each installation keeps its own collection. JSON can move item records, folders and notes to a new device, but it does not contain the photo files.

A subscription follows the store account that paid for it, not the app. A purchase made on iOS restores on any iPhone or iPad signed in to that Apple ID, and a purchase made on Android restores on any device signed in to that Google account. It does not cross between the two, because there is no account of ours to tie them together - that is the trade for not making you register.

Use Settings > Restore purchases after reinstalling or setting up a new device.

Every plan, including the paid ones, allows up to 50 scans a day and 300 a calendar month. When our listing says unlimited, that is what it means, and we would rather print the numbers than let you discover them.

Without a subscription you get 5 scans a calendar month, plus 1 free scan when you first set the app up.

The caps exist because each scan costs us real money at a model provider, and one uncapped user can make the app unaffordable for everyone else. They are enforced on our servers, and if you reach one the app tells you which cap it was and when it resets.

They are set high enough that ordinary collecting never touches them. If you are cataloguing a house clearance, a dealer’s stock, or a museum drawer, email binarydatatechnology151@gmail.com rather than fighting the limiter - we would rather help.

Through the store, not through us - the store holds the subscription, so it is the only place that can stop it.

On iPhone or iPad: Settings > tap your name at the top > Subscriptions > Curio > Cancel.

On Android: open Google Play > tap your profile picture > Payments and subscriptions > Subscriptions > Curio > Cancel.

Cancelling stops the next charge. You keep access until the period you have already paid for runs out. If you cancel during the free trial you are not charged at all, and the trial still runs to its end.

Deleting the app does not cancel anything. That catches people out on every subscription app there is, so: cancel first, then delete.

The lifetime option at $79.99 is a single payment rather than a subscription, so there is nothing to cancel.

Refunds work the same way: whichever store took your money handles them, because we never touch it. On iOS use reportaproblem.apple.com, on Android use the Google Play refund form or your order history. We can neither grant nor refuse one. If something is simply broken, email binarydatatechnology151@gmail.com first - a fixed bug is a faster route to a working app than a refund is.

Yearly is $39.99 a year with a 7-day free trial, weekly is $6.99 a week, and lifetime is $79.99 once. Your store converts to local currency and adds any tax, so the confirmation screen is the number that counts.

Paying removes the monthly scan limit, within the fair-use caps above. Everything else - your collection, folders, notes, search, totals, export, and every result you have already saved - works on the free plan and keeps working if you stop paying. We do not lock your own collection behind a subscription.

The weekly plan exists for people clearing a loft in a fortnight, not as the default. If you are going to use the app for more than about six weeks, the yearly plan is cheaper.