Identify a Set or Part

PRO

Got a sealed set you can't quite place, or a loose brick rattling around in a drawer? Afolio's two Identify tools narrow the LEGO catalog down by attributes you can see — colour, shape, dimensions — until only a handful of candidate sets or parts remain.

Both tools live under the Tools menu on macOS:

Identify a Set — ⌘⇧I
Identify a Part — ⌘⇧P

Each tool opens its own window so the filters don't bleed into the main split-view selection.

Identify a Set

Pick attributes about the set you're trying to recognise. Every filter you add tightens the search — a set only qualifies when it matches every selected filter.

Colours — click one or more colour chips. A set qualifies if at least 15 % of its non-spare pieces fall into that colour group. This is "dominant colour", not "any piece" — otherwise every set ever made would match yellow.
Pieces — piece-count buckets (0–99, 100–499, etc.). Multi-select but contiguous: click chips next to each other to widen the range.
Year — minimum and maximum release year.
Minifigs — 0, 1+, or 5+ minifigures in the set's inventory.
Stickers / Animals — yes or no toggles for whether the set contains any sticker sheets or animal/creature parts.
Add Part — pick a specific catalog part (optionally restricted to a colour group) or type a search term to match parts by name.
Add Minifig — same idea for minifigures, by fig number or by name keyword.

The header shows the current candidate count. When 100 or fewer sets match, a grid of candidate cards appears below; above that, the tool just says "refine your search". Clicking a candidate card opens a preview sheet with the set's image, name, year and piece count. Reveal in Catalog jumps the main window to that set so you can add it to your collection or open the inventory.

Identify a Part

The part version works the same way, but searches the parts catalog. Filters include:

Colour — multi-select colour chips, plus a separate Transparent toggle if you want any transparent colour regardless of hue.
Shape — pick one shape family: brick, plate or tile, curved, round, wheel/tyre, window/door, panel, plant, animal, sticker, or Technic. It's a single-select chip row — click a chip to switch shapes, click the active chip to clear it. Plates and tiles share a chip because they look alike from above; use the Studs on top toggle to distinguish them. Sloped pieces are filtered with the Sloped toggle in the Attributes section rather than a dedicated chip.
Dimensions — numeric fields for the piece's stud dimensions. The number of fields depends on the selected shape: bricks, panels, and windows/doors get three (width × depth × height); plates/tiles, curved, round, and wheels get two; plant/animal/sticker/Technic hide the section entirely because their names don't follow the stud-grid convention. Order doesn't matter: entering "5", "4", "6" matches any brick whose dimensions are some permutation of those numbers. Partial input is allowed: entering "2" and "4" matches a 2 × 4 plate and a 2 × 4 × 3 brick (because the 2 × 4 face is what you'd see looking at it). Turn on Exact axis count to require the part to have the same number of dimensions as your input.
Technic, Curved, Sloped — yes/no toggles that match against the part's category and (for curved/sloped) name keywords like "curved", "round", "dish", or "slope".
Studs on top / side / bottom — yes/no toggles approximated from category and part name. Studs-on-side is the patchiest of the three: many parts with side studs aren't explicitly tagged in the catalog, so a "No" answer is more reliable than a "Yes" answer here.
Name contains — free-text keyword search against the part name.

As with Identify a Set, the candidate grid appears when 100 or fewer pieces match. Clicking a card opens a preview sheet; Reveal in Catalog opens the parts catalog at that piece.

About the approximations

Afolio's bundled catalog doesn't store every physical attribute of every piece — for instance, there's no first-class "this piece has studs on its side" flag. The shape, Technic, curved, sloped and studs-placement filters infer those traits from the catalog's part categories and the part names. They're best-effort, not exact:

"Curved" matches both the Bricks Curved category and parts whose names contain "curved", "round" or "dish".
"Sloped" matches the Bricks Sloped category plus names containing "slope".
"Studs on top" defaults to true for bricks and plates, plus any other part whose name contains "plate" or "brick" (e.g. wheel forks with a plate base), unless the name explicitly says "no studs".
"Studs on side" matches a small set of name keywords ("studs on side", "sideways", etc.); recall is patchy and a real "Yes" answer can miss legitimate pieces.
"Studs on bottom" matches pieces whose name contains "Inverted" — this catches inverted slopes, inverted curved slopes, and inverted brackets, which is what LEGO collectors typically mean by "studs on bottom".

If the right piece isn't in your candidate list, try loosening one of these approximate filters — the colour, dimensions and name filters are exact and usually narrow the list further than the shape and studs filters.