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How Scanning Works

Your Card Butler scanning machine communicates with your dashboard over the internet (via MQTT/AWS IoT), so scans appear in your account in near real time — there's no cable to plug in or file to import.

The scan pipeline​

  1. You start a scan session in the app (see Starting & Reviewing a Scan) and place cards on the machine's tray.
  2. The machine captures an image of each card and uploads it for processing.
  3. A backend recognition engine matches the card against the reference database using its visual and text features — identifying name, set, language, and foiling.
  4. A result is written back to your account as a ScannedCard:
    • Detected / linked — the card was matched with high confidence.
    • Undetected / unlinked — the card couldn't be matched automatically and needs you to confirm it manually.

Every scanned card starts in the Pending review status regardless of whether it was auto-matched — approving it (individually or in bulk) is what confirms it as correct.

While a scan is running​

The scan's detail page shows a live machine session panel with:

  • Pause / Resume / End controls
  • Automatic session renewal so upload links don't expire mid-scan
  • On-screen guidance if the machine detects a card stuck (clear the path and press Resume) or a possible double-feed (separate and re-seat the cards, then press Resume)

Reviewing pending cards​

Open a scan session from Inventorize → Scans to see any cards awaiting review. For each one, you can approve a confident match, search the database yourself to link the correct card, or delete it if it was a misread. Once every card is approved, you move on to filing them into a box section — see Starting & Reviewing a Scan for the complete step-by-step flow.

Scanning requires an active plan​

Every scan draws from a plan that "powers" the machine and the recognition engine — see Plans & Shopping for the different plan types and how to buy one.