How to Value a Whole Pile of Minifigures at Once (Not One at a Time)

The reason valuing a bulk lot feels impossible is that the obvious method scales linearly. Identify a figure, search it, read a price, note it down, put it in a pile, pick up the next one. Two minutes a figure is optimistic. Seventy figures is over two hours, and you will make mistakes in the last forty because you will be bored.

Photo scanning changes the unit of work. The unit stops being one figure and becomes one photograph. Seventy figures across three photographs is three jobs.

Here is the workflow that gets a real box done in one sitting.

Before you photograph anything: stage the lot

Ten minutes here is worth an hour of rescanning. The goal is simple — every figure visible, front-facing, not touching its neighbours.

1. Clear a table and put down something plain. A light-coloured bath towel is ideal: it is neutral, it kills reflections, and figures stand up on it instead of sliding.
2. Tip the box out and separate obvious non-figures — loose accessories, animals, brick-built things, spare heads. Set those aside; they are not minifigures and the scan will only spend effort rejecting them.
3. Stand the figures up in loose rows. They do not need to be tidy. They need to be upright, facing you, and not overlapping. Leave a finger's width between figures.
4. Group by how interesting they look. Put the plain City civilians together and the licensed characters together. This matters for the next section.
5. Find the light. A window on a cloudy day beats every lamp in the house. Turn overhead spotlights off — they put each figure's own face in shadow.

How many figures per photo?

Twenty to forty. That is the range where a phone's sensor still gives each figure enough pixels for its printed detail to be readable, while keeping the number of photos low.

Brick Loupe is built for dense frames — that is the case it was designed around, not an edge case it tolerates — but physics still applies. Two hundred figures in one wide shot means each figure is a thumbnail, and torso printing is where identification lives.

So for a box of seventy, plan on two or three wide photos, not one.

Work in two passes

This is the trick that makes bulk valuation both fast and accurate.

Pass one — the wide shots

Photograph your rows, twenty to forty figures at a time. Hold the camera parallel to the table, roughly a metre up, and tap to focus on the middle of the group.

Results stream in as figures are found, so you can start reading the first identifications while the rest of the frame is still processing. Add the whole scan to your collection in one action.

Repeat for each group. Ten minutes, and the bulk of the box is inventoried.

Pass two — portraits of the interesting few

Now sort your collection by value. Two or three figures will be sitting well clear of the rest. Those are the ones worth a proper photograph.

Take each of them, or two or three together, and photograph them upright, front-on, filling the frame, in the best light you have. A high-value figure deserves a confident identification, because that number is the one you will act on.

Rescanning a photo you have already scanned does not cost you another scan from your allowance. So checking a result a second time is free — take the second look.

Reading the result

The number at the bottom is the lot total. It is the least interesting number on the screen.

What you actually want is the shape of the distribution, and sorting by value gives it to you in one tap. Almost every mixed box comes out looking like this:

• A long tail of near-worthless figures. Generic civilians, plain knights, incomplete figures. Individually pennies.
• A middle band worth a few pounds each. Recognisable characters in played-with condition. This is where most of a normal lot's money sits, in aggregate.
• One, two, maybe three outliers worth more than the entire tail combined.

That shape determines what you do next. The tail goes out as a bundle — nobody is listing a plain City worker individually. The middle band might go out in themed bundles. The outliers get individual listings, careful photographs and honest condition notes.

Getting that split right is worth more than squeezing another 5% of accuracy out of the tail.

Set the condition while you are there

Condition is not a detail on a bulk lot; it is a large fraction of the value. Brick Loupe stores New and Used separately on every collection row, and you can change a whole selection at once — select all, set Used, done.

Be honest. A box that has been in a loft since 2003 is Used, however clean the figures look. Printing fades, plastic yellows, and buyers notice.

What about the ones it couldn't identify?

You will have some. Every identifier has a coverage limit, and a bulk photo produces the hardest cases — figures at an angle, figures half-hidden, parts mash-ups that exist in no catalogue.

Three routes:

• "Maybe?" on a low-confidence result re-runs the identification on that crop.
• Rescan the figure on its own, front-on and well lit. This fixes most of them.
• Search by name. The catalogue holds 19,041 minifigures and 24,888 sets; find it, set the quantity, add it by hand. It prices exactly like a scanned figure.

Don't chase the last few. If four figures out of seventy resist identification and they are all obviously plain civilians, their combined value is under a pound and your time is worth more.

Doing this for buying, not selling

The same workflow works in reverse, and it is arguably more valuable there.

When a marketplace listing shows "70 minifigures, job lot" with one photograph, the Chrome and Firefox extensions let you click that photograph on the listing page itself and scan it in place. You get a per-figure breakdown of somebody else's lot before you bid on it.

That tells you the two things the listing never does: whether there is anything genuinely good in the pile, and whether the asking price is sensible.

Get your box done

Scan a photo in your browser from a desktop, or get the app and work through the box with your phone. Free to try, no account required to start; signing in turns on the cloud collection so the inventory follows you.

Frequently asked questions

How many LEGO minifigures can I scan in one photo?

Twenty to forty is the practical sweet spot. Brick Loupe is designed for dense photos and handles dozens of figures in a single frame, but each figure needs enough pixels for its printed detail to be readable. For a box of seventy, use two or three photos rather than one.

How do I value a bulk LEGO minifigure lot quickly?

Spread the figures upright on a plain background in soft daylight, photograph them twenty to forty at a time, and add each scan to your collection in one action. Then sort by value. A box of seventy takes about ten minutes of photography and gives you a per-figure priced inventory.

Can I check what a job lot is worth before I buy it?

Yes. With the Brick Loupe Chrome or Firefox extension you can click the listing's own photograph on the marketplace page and scan it in place, which gives you a per-figure breakdown of the lot before you bid. You can also save the photo and drop it into the browser scanner.

Does rescanning the same photo use up another scan?

No. A photo you have already scanned is recognised and rescanned without charging your allowance again, so taking a second look at a result costs nothing.

What is the best background for scanning a pile of minifigures?

Something plain and contrasting — a light-coloured towel, a sheet of paper, a plain table top. Avoid LEGO baseplates and patterned carpets: brick-shaped texture in the background makes the detector work harder for no benefit.

Should I sell a bulk lot together or split it up?

Sort your scanned collection by value and let the distribution decide. The long tail of common figures sells better as a bundle than as individual listings nobody watches. The one or two outliers at the top are worth individual listings with their own photographs. Splitting on that boundary usually beats both extremes.