You’re standing in a three-bedroom ranch with a full basement, a two-car garage, and a pole barn out back. The heirs want it cleared by the end of the month. There are maybe four hundred things worth selling, and you are one person with one phone.
The old answer was: hire a couple of people who know how to catalog, or spend a week doing it yourself. The version most auction software sells you is a native app you install on a company phone, log into with a company account, and hope the part-timer you hired for the weekend doesn’t need a password reset at 8am Saturday.
Here’s the version we built instead. You open the auction, click Share capture link, and text the link to whoever is helping you. They tap it. The camera opens. They start shooting lots. No app store, no login, no account for them. That’s the whole setup, and this post is about exactly how it works — including the parts where it stops.
What the link actually is
When you open the share dialog on an auction, Hammerwerks mints a capture link tied to that one auction and hands you three things: the URL, a Copy button, and a QR code. Text the URL to a helper across the county, or hold up the QR code for someone standing next to you to scan. Either way lands them on the same page — a phone camera pointed at your catalog.
Four things are true about that link, and they matter:
- It needs no login. Your helper never makes an account, never gets a password, never installs anything. They tap the link and shoot.
- It’s scoped to one auction. The link works for the Miller estate and nothing else. It can’t see your other sales, your bidder list, or your settlement. Photos shot through it land as draft lots in that one catalog.
- It only works while the auction is in catalog mode. The moment you move that sale out of draft — you’ve finished cataloging and you’re getting ready to go live — the link stops accepting uploads on its own. You don’t have to remember to shut it off. It fails closed.
- You can revoke it any time. One click, and the link is dead. Anyone still holding it gets a polite “this link has been revoked” and can’t upload another thing.
That last pair is the point. The link is disposable. Mint one for the weekend, hand it around, revoke it Sunday night. Mint a fresh one for the next estate.
Several phones, one catalog
The link is shareable, not seat-based. Text it to your spouse, your part-timer, and the neighbor kid who’s good with a camera, and all three phones feed the same catalog at once. You’re in the kitchen shooting the sterling, your helper is in the garage shooting hand tools, and lots from both phones pile up in the same review queue back at the workbench.
Nobody coordinates. Nobody claims a room in some app. Everyone just shoots what’s in front of them, each photo set becomes a draft lot, and you sort it out later at the desk where sorting it out is easy. For a big estate, three phones for an afternoon is the difference between a weekend and a week.
The tradeoff, which we’ll be blunt about below, is that a shared link is exactly that — shared. It doesn’t know which phone is which.
When the signal drops in the basement
Farm outbuildings and finished basements are where cell signal goes to die, and that’s exactly where the good lots are. So the capture page is built to keep working when the bars run out.
As your helper shoots — photos, notes, whichever step they’re on — the page saves that in-progress lot to the phone itself, not to the network. If the page reloads, if iOS Safari quietly evicts the tab to reclaim memory, if the signal drops mid-lot, the work is still there when they come back. Photos and all. It holds on the phone and uploads when signal returns.
We want to be precise about this, because “works offline” is one of those phrases every vendor prints and few of them mean. Here is what we actually promise and what we don’t:
- What holds: the lot they’re working on right now — its photos and notes — is saved locally so a reload or a signal drop doesn’t erase it.
- What still needs signal: the actual upload to your catalog. The work waits on the phone and goes up when there are bars again. If the phone goes in a lake before it reconnects, that work is gone.
So: best-effort offline, honestly. It’s a safety net against the ordinary ways field work gets lost — not a guarantee that a phone in airplane mode for three days will sync perfectly on the fourth. Tell your helpers to get back to signal and confirm their lots uploaded before they call it a day. That habit costs nothing and closes the gap.
The honest boundaries
Three things about this link are limits, not features, and you should hear them from us instead of finding out at the wrong moment.
It’s a scoped shared link, not a per-user secure login. Anyone who has the link can view and edit every lot in that auction — titles, prices, photos, all of it. It doesn’t authenticate individual people; it authorizes anyone holding it. That’s the right design for “text it to a helper for the weekend,” and the wrong mental model if you were picturing named accounts with their own permissions. Treat the link like a key to that one job: don’t post it publicly, hand it only to people you’d hand a key, and revoke it when the cataloging is done. If it ever leaks, revoking and minting a fresh one takes one click.
It’s a web link, not a native app. It opens in the phone’s browser as a web app. That’s deliberate — it’s why there’s no install and no login — but it means it behaves like a very good web page, not a native camera app with every last hardware trick. For shooting lots, in practice, you won’t notice. We’re telling you because “app” sets an expectation and we’d rather be accurate.
Offline is best-effort, as covered above. The net catches the common cases. It is not a promise the laws of radio have been repealed in your basement.
What the link does not change
Capture saves the typing, not the deciding. That’s worth repeating in the context of handing work to a helper, because it’s tempting to think you’ve handed off the judgment too. You haven’t.
What your helper’s photos trigger is a draft. The AI reads each photo set and drafts a title, description, category, condition, and a value range, with a confidence score on each field. A second AI reviews that draft. Then it lands in your review queue and you approve it — every lot, still, at the desk. A helper with a phone can fill your queue in an afternoon. Only you empty it. The candelabra your neighbor kid shot gets the same auctioneer’s eye it always did before it goes in the catalog. That’s not a limitation to apologize for; on the anchor lots and anything where grade or authenticity is the whole game, it’s the entire job.
How to actually run it on a big estate
A cadence that holds up:
- Open the sale, mint the link, send it out. Copy it into a text to each helper before you leave for the property, or show the QR on-site.
- Split the building. One person per zone — you take the anchor lots in the good light, helpers take the volume in the garage and basement. Everything flows to the same queue.
- Tell everyone the signal rule. Before anyone leaves, they walk back to a spot with bars and confirm their last few lots uploaded. Thirty seconds of insurance.
- Review at the desk. Back home, work the queue. Correct, don’t compose. Approve lot by lot.
- Revoke the link. When the catalog’s built, kill the link. Next estate gets a fresh one.
That’s the wedge, plainly: the link takes the one job that genuinely parallelizes — putting eyes and a camera on four hundred objects — and lets you throw as many hands at it as you’ve got, without provisioning a single account. The part that shouldn’t parallelize, the approving, stays with you.
If you want to see the capture link, the review queue, and the approve step in one sitting, the 90-second demo walks the whole path, or grab 15 minutes on my calendar and I’ll mint a link on a real auction and text it to your phone while we talk — you’ll be shooting a lot inside a minute, no account required.