When an extraction fails
What the failure reasons mean, when retrying will help, and how to give yourself the best chance of a good extraction.
Extraction fails occasionally. When it does, ImportOps tells you why and whether retrying is likely to help. This article covers every reason a sheet might be rejected and what to do about each one.
Where failures show up
A failed extraction appears as a red-bordered card with a short error message on the Auction sheet tab of the vehicle.
The four failure reasons
Timeout
The extraction took too long to complete. This is almost always a transient issue.
- What to do: click Retry. If it fails again on retry, wait a minute and try once more.
Service error
A temporary error stopped the extraction. Also usually transient.
- What to do: click Retry. If it keeps failing across multiple attempts, the service may be temporarily down; try again later.
Image too small
The image doesn't have enough pixels to be read reliably. This is not retryable with the same file.
- What to do: re-scan or re-photograph the sheet at higher resolution. A clean scan at 300dpi or better works well. Close-up photos taken straight-on and in good light also work; angled phone shots taken in low light usually don't.
Image too blurred
The image is in focus enough to look OK to a human but too soft for the small text to be read reliably. Not retryable with the same file.
- What to do: re-scan or re-photograph. For phone shots, tap to focus before taking the shot, hold the phone parallel to the sheet, and avoid zooming in digitally.
Retrying
The review view only shows Retry for failure reasons where retrying is likely to help (Timeout and Service error). For size and blur failures, there's no retry; the image itself is the problem.
Close the error card and upload again with the better file.
Closing the failed card
If you'd rather try a different file than retry the same one, click Close on the error card. This removes the failed extraction from the view so you can upload something else.
Good quality, fast extraction
A few habits that give you a good first-try extraction every time:
- Supply the full sheet. Don't crop it. The extraction uses the layout to find fields.
- Scan, don't photograph. A flat scanner gives the best result. PDF exports from scanner apps are fine.
- If you must photograph: good light, flat surface, phone parallel to the sheet, tap to focus, no digital zoom.
- Avoid watermarks or heavy stamps over the inspector's notes or the body diagram.
- PDFs are fine, including multi-page PDFs.
What Delete does versus Close
- Close on a failed card: removes the failed extraction so you can upload again. Clean-slate retry.
- Delete on a successful extraction (in review or approved state): removes the image and every extracted field. Irreversible.