Hide the cert number on graded cards

Why people hide the certification number

Every graded card has a certification number on its label that belongs to it alone, printed in plain digits and nearly always repeated in a barcode. Anyone who types it on the grading company's website finds the record of that card: the name, the grade and, for many cards, the photos taken when it was graded. It is the tool a buyer uses to check that the slab is genuine, and that is exactly why the number is valuable to people who fake slabs.

A fake slab with a made-up number is caught at the first check, while a fake slab with the number of a real card passes it. In August 2021, in a discussion among collectors, someone reported a first edition Shining Charizard graded PSA 10 listed on eBay with the certification number of the real copy, which in those same days was up for sale as well. The fake gave itself away through details that are easy to miss in a photo, such as a label printed crooked and a slab too big for the card inside. The number, on the other hand, was the real one, and a real number can be copied from any published photo.

That is why many collectors, when they show a card on social media or in a group, cover the label by hand with a sticker, a scribble or a finger. This tool does the same thing on its own: it finds the number, the barcode and the QR code, erases them, and all that is left for you is to check that everything is covered.

When it pays to give the number instead

Covering the number has a cost, and it is worth knowing before you do it. Someone buying a graded card wants to check the certificate on the grading company's website, see what that copy sold for in the past and compare the photos in the record with the ones in the listing. On collector forums the topic comes up often, and the answer of many buyers is clear: you buy the card, not the slab, and the number is the only way to know that the card that arrives is the one in the photo.

There is also a risk opposite to fake slabs. A seller who hides the number can show one card and ship another one with the same grade, and the buyer has nothing in hand to dispute it. The middle way many people use is simple: in photos that show off a collection, on social media and in groups, the number gets covered; in a sale listing it gets covered in the public photos and given privately to whoever is really interested, or it is left in view, which is the most transparent choice of all.

What the tool finds

On the labels of the most common companies the number shows up in more than one form, and the tool looks for all of them. The first is the barcode that PSA, Beckett and CGC print on the label. First it tries to read it, and when the photo is too small or too blurry to decode it, it recognizes it by its shape: a row of parallel, dense and regular bars can be seen even when it cannot be read, and it gets covered all the same. The second is the QR code that PSA labels have carried on the back since 2017, as CGC labels do too, and that leads to the record of the card: if you photograph the back, it has to be hidden too.

The third form is the number written in digits. To find it the page reads the text in the photo, first around the codes, straightening the label if the photo is tilted, and then across the whole photo, and it keeps the runs of at least seven digits, or six if they sit next to a code. It fixes the typical mix-ups of automatic reading, such as an O instead of a zero or an l instead of a one, and when the barcode has been read it uses its content to recognize the number even when the reading got only part of it or a digit or two wrong. Beckett's silver labels, grey in a light photo, get a second pass that judges the contrast area by area. The text reader is the same one used by Image to text.

The tool does not know which company made the slab and does not need to, because it looks for codes and numbers wherever they are: it works the same way with paper labels and with slabs that have the text printed into the plastic. Nor does the game matter: Pokémon, Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, One Piece, Lorcana, Dragon Ball, Digimon and sports cards all end up in the same slabs, with the same labels. It does not touch the grade, the card name or the rest of the label, which are exactly the things you want to show.

Erase, do not blur

Blurring or pixelating a number looks like enough and is not. There are ten possible digits and the font of a label is always the same: you just try the candidate numbers, blur them the same way and keep the one that gives the same image. That is why there is no blur here, and the trick used to read blurred text back is explained at length in Cover data in a screenshot.

The starting choice is Erase: the area of the code is repainted with the color of the label around it, taken from the pixels just outside the box and never from the ones inside, with a little grain so that it does not look like a flat patch. The result is a label that seems to have never had the number. If you would rather show that something was there, you can choose a black bar or a white bar.

In all three cases the file you download is rebuilt from scratch: the original photo is redrawn on a fresh canvas and the covers are printed on top. Nothing is left underneath to recover, and there is no layer to move as in a graphics program.

Always look at the photo before posting it

The tool almost always finds what it should, but almost always is not enough when a mistake ends up online. The glare on the plastic can fall right on the digits, a photo taken at a sharp angle skews the text, and on a slab shot from far away the number can be too small to read. That is why, when it is done, it tells you what it covered. If the number still shows, drag on the photo to draw a box over it, or press “Add a box” and move it where it is needed.

The opposite can happen too, and it may cover something that is not a code: a card with a pattern of tight stripes, for example, can look like a barcode. Every box sits in the list under the photo with a button to remove it, and “Restore the ones found” puts everything back as it was after the search.

The number can also slip out elsewhere: from the title or the description of the listing, from another photo where the back shows, from the name of the photo if you named it after the number. Every run of six or more digits is already removed from the name of the downloaded file, but the rest has to be checked by eye.

Your photos stay on your phone

All the work is done by your browser: the photos are not uploaded to any server and nobody sees them. The first time the page downloads the code reader and the text reader, about 9 MB in all, and then keeps them, so from the second time on it starts right away. On a recent phone a photo is checked in a few seconds, and you can load up to twenty.

The photo you download comes out in the same format as the original, except for iPhone HEIC and AVIF, which come out as JPG because it is the format everything opens. The size stays the same, except on the iPhone and the iPad when the photo goes over 16.7 million pixels: there Safari does not draw images that big, so it comes out a little smaller and the page tells you. It also comes out without the hidden data phones add, such as the date, the model and the location, because the image is new. On the iPhone the “Share or save to Photos” button opens the share menu, from which the photo can be saved to the camera roll or sent straight to an app. If instead you only want to strip that data from a photo without covering anything, the quicker way is Remove metadata.