Tutorial // Clean up your Pins

Pinterest is great.  It’s a fantastic way to discover new things and people.  It’s a wonderful way to gather ideas alone or with a group of people (we use group boards to plan shoots for Cotton & Brass).

But it has a dark side too.  I re-pin a lot.  Often times when I find something I love and want to find out more I discover the original source of the pin has gotten lost along the way.  Either it has been pinned from a tumblr, it was uploaded or was pinned from a source that doesn’t include the original source (for shame!).  Lately, when I run across pins like this on my board I have been trying to clean them up.  It doesn’t take long and giving credit where credit is due is just plain polite.

Here is how to clean up pins with broken sources…

Find a pin with a broken or missing source.  For the example of this tutorial, I’m going to be using this pin (now corrected) from my Beautiful Things board.

Super cool photo of a collection of erasers.  Is it part of a series?  What else does the photographer do?  Do they sell prints?  These are all things I wanted to know.  But when I clicked to find out more, this is what I found…

Oh no!  Source is lost because it was pinned from a tumblr page (don’t do this) and has now been buried under a mountain of posts.  I searched back the first few pages and didn’t find it.  So it’s time to do some detective work.

There are a handful or reverse image search engines out there like Tin Eye, but I find Google’s reverse image search to be the most helpful.  Drag the pin to your desktop and upload it into the reverse image search (EDIT ::  Or you can just copy the image URL and paste it into the search bar) and click the little magnifying glass.  Here is what popped up for my broken pin…

It was an easy one!  The first item in the results is the original photographer, Johnny Miller.  Perfect!  So now I know where it is from, I searched the page for the source of the photo and now it’s time to clean up that pin source.

Copy the URL from the original source page (NOT the image source URL).  Head back to your pin and hover over the image to pull up the ‘Edit’ option.

Paste the corrected source in the ‘Link’ field and click ‘Save Pin”.  Super easy, and once you get in a groove it doesn’t take long at all.  Some pins take longer to track down than others, but as I said it’s good internet etiquette to take the time to do this.  If everyone took a Sunday afternoon to clean up a few of their boards and make an effort to pin from the original source, Pinterest would be a much better resource for everyone.

Feel free to follow me on Pinterest for pretty pinning!  And add Lost & Fawned to your RSS feed for more tutorials and tips like this one.