The focus of this study was to characterise and quantify the nature of free gold particles recovered in a plant setting featuring parallel gravity concentration and flash flotation processes, with an emphasis on the influence of size and shape as a review of the literature suggests the importance of such attributes on a particle's recovery behaviour. Automated mineralogical analysis (AMA) was employed to quantify the free gold particles' circularity and sphericity measurements using two and three dimensional (2D/3D) methods. As expected, the 2D results indicated that free gold particles (-2121+38 mu m) reporting to the gravity concentrate in were, on average, more circular than those of the flash concentrate. However, 3D sphericity characterisations of the same samples offered opposing results. Such a conflict identifies the limitation for application of simple 2D and 3D shape characterisations for malleable and irregularly shaped free gold particles. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.