The Card Scanner Is Faster and Stops Missing Cards
If the scanner has felt slow, it wasn’t your camera or your lighting. It was us. Over the last two weeks more than a third of scans came back empty — and when we dug into why, the cause was a bug rather than anything about the photos people were taking.
What was actually wrong
The scanner is supposed to wait until the picture holds still before sending it. That check was written, but it never ran: an internal flag reset itself after every attempt, so the next attempt always fired immediately — usually while the camera was still moving. Simulated against a typical two-second settle, the scanner was capturing a blurry frame about half the time. A blurry frame identifies nothing, so you’d wait four seconds and it would try again, just as blurry.
It now waits for a steady shot — and checks far more often
The scanner samples the camera several times a second and fires the moment the picture has been still for about half a second. In testing that removed blurry captures entirely, and in the common case it identifies the card sooner than before, because it stops burning four-second cycles on photos that were never going to work.
Higher resolution, so numbers read correctly
Captures are now noticeably sharper. The collector number in the corner of a card — the thing that separates one printing from another — was previously right at the edge of legibility, which is where most wrong identifications came from. It’s now comfortably readable, which should mean fewer cards matched to the wrong set.
It tells you when it can’t see a card
There was a check meant to avoid wasting a scan on an empty table. It was too strict — full-art and gold cards on a dark surface fell outside it — and when it skipped, it skipped silently, which is indistinguishable from the app being broken. The check is looser now, and after a few skips in a row you’ll see “Point at a card — fill the frame” instead of nothing at all.
For affiliates
If you’re in the PokeTrack affiliate program, there’s now an Affiliate tab in the app with your signups, conversions, what you’ve earned, what’s been paid and what’s outstanding, broken down by month. You only ever see your own numbers.
A bug meant the scanner often took its photo while the camera was still moving, and a blurry photo can’t be identified. It now waits until the image holds still, which removes that failure. If you still see it, move to brighter light and fill the frame with the card.
Hold the card still and fill the guide frame. The scanner fires about half a second after the picture settles, so a steady hand is now genuinely quicker than sweeping the camera around.
The collector number is what separates two printings of the same card, and it sits in small text at the bottom corner. Captures are now higher resolution so that number reads correctly far more often. If a match is still wrong you can change the set on the result before saving.
Not yet. We’ve built and tested the groundwork for photographing several cards laid out at once, but we won’t ship it until you can review every result before it’s added to your collection.