How I used Google Lens to sift through and price my childhood sports card collection.

Being it’s the holiday season, I took a brief trip from my home of Orlando to Helena, Montana to visit my parents.

One of the highlights of that trip — aside from seeing my family — was reconnecting with my childhood sports card collection. 🏈 🏀 ⚾️

Thanks to TikTok, I’ve recently become reacquainted with card collecting as a hobby, and I was curious if any of the cards I’d collected as a kid had any value today.

This is just a fraction of them:

Being an SEO, I naturally wanted to use Google Search to power my pricing evaluations.

Then again, I had roughly a few thousand cards to dig through.

My first instinct was to type in the cards details as a regular query, but that quickly became tedious and time consuming. 🙅

Then I remembered my adventure looking for new shoes, where I used Google Lens as a starting point.

I immediately started taking pictures of the cards and just searching those as the query. (Multimodal search, if you will.)

Amazingly, the first item that popped up about 90% of the time was the card with an associated price, usually from eBay.

It took me a few evenings to get through all of the cards.

It was a fun little project, and I even compiled a binder’s worth to take home as the foundation of my soon-to-be-new collection.

If you’re into sports cards or collectibles in general, I recommend giving Google Lens a try when it comes to pricing your items.

Thanks for reading. Happy optimizing! 🤗

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