Clearing a parent’s house now tends to begin with a phone. Executors work room by room, photographing whatever is on the sideboard or behind the glass of the display cabinet, and Google Lens returns an answer in a couple of seconds. It is free, it is fast, and on a good day it is genuinely impressive about what an object is.

What it will not do is tell you what that object is worth for probate. Identification and valuation are two separate pieces of work, and Lens only performs one of them. What follows sets out where the tool earns its place in an executor’s process (because Google Lens is brilliant at some things), why the prices it surfaces cannot support a figure on form IHT407, and the sequence that does produce a number capable of standing up.

What Google Lens Gets Right When Identifying Antiques

Lens is a visual match engine trained on an enormous quantity of images, and for identification that is exactly the right architecture. Photograph a printed backstamp cleanly and it will usually name the factory. It reads pattern names on Victorian transferware, recognises the silhouette of a Georgian silver form, and will often place a piece of furniture in the right period and broad style.

On jewellery it is frequently better than people expect at the one thing that matters most for a signed piece, which is the house. Show it a distinctive Georg Jensen brooch or a recognisable Cartier design and it will commonly get there. Designer attribution is a pattern-matching problem, and pattern matching is what the tool does.

This is worth saying without qualification. Twenty years ago the equivalent was a shelf of reference books, a magnifying glass and a slow afternoon. An executor with no background in the field can now put a name to most of a house in an evening. That is a real gain, and anyone dismissing it out of hand is not paying attention.

Google Lens Valuation Accuracy and the Absence of Hammer Prices

The difficulty starts when the same photograph is asked to produce a number.

For inheritance tax, household goods are valued under section 160 of the Inheritance Tax Act 1984, which sets the standard as the price the property might reasonably be expected to fetch if sold on the open market at the date of death. We have set out what that means in practice in our guide to HMRC’s open market value. The short version is that the best evidence of open market value is what comparable items have actually sold for at auction.

Lens has no access into that data. The sold archives sit on the-saleroom.com and Invaluable, largely behind subscription, structured as searchable records (the-saleroom.com, invaluable.com, artrpice.com etc) rather than as indexed web pages a visual matcher can read. eBay’s completed listings are the same. What Lens returns instead is the open web: dealer stock pages, live listings, retail sites. Those are asking prices. An asking price is what a seller hopes for, and it can sit at three or four times hammer on the same object, before you take off commission. Building an IHT407 figure from asking prices inflates the taxable estate as a matter of arithmetic, not bad luck.

There is a second problem, and it is the more serious one. The identification itself becomes least reliable at precisely the point where value is decided. A 19th century original and a 20th century copy of the same form are, in a photograph, close to indistinguishable. The tells are physical and small: the profile of the lip, the colour of the body where it meets the foot, the depth and tone of the glaze, the pattern of crazing across the surface. Pick the piece up and the answer is usually immediate. Photograph it and those distinctions simply do not survive. The difference between the two can be an order of magnitude.

How to Value House Contents for Probate Without Guessing

Over-declaration is the common failure. Executors err high, believing caution is safer, and the estate pays for it.

Where an estate exceeds the nil rate band, inheritance tax is charged at 40% on the excess. Reduce a contents figure by £300 and the estate saves £120. Our house contents valuation is £119, so it covers its own cost at around £298 of correction, which on a house full of over-estimated furniture and ceramics is not a demanding target. Below the threshold the tax saving does not arise, though an accurate figure still matters for distribution between beneficiaries and for your position as executor.

Use Google Lens to identify items, but do not rely on it for accurate probate figures.

If you are working through a house and want the figures to be defensible, our house contents probate valuation covers the whole property for a fixed fee.