Friday, December 17, 2010 at 10:29AMHow To Pin Images To Pinterest From The iPhone
Welcome to Simply The Nest! I'm an English girl blogging about a 130 year old Victorian house DIY renovation. You can read more about me here, check out our house tour here, and view our main before and after gallery here.
Want to get straight to the good stuff? Get started with these iPhone Pinterest instructions, and then try pinning the image below :-)
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Update April 2013: You may want to check Pinterest's copyright policy here.
So the other day I figured out how to pin images to Pinterest while browsing on an iPhone. I know, right? You're welcome!
In case you haven't discovered Pinterest yet, it's freaking awesome. It's basically the answer to my what-on-earth-do-I-do-with-all-these-cool-online-pics-that-I-wanna-keep-for-inspiration problem.
Previously, whenever I came across a cool image online, I would save into onto my C Drive as a jpeg, but I quickly realised that not only would this end up taking up LOTS of storage (and we are already into terabytes territory chez nous), but I just couldn't figure out a way to easily record the link where I'd found the image, in order to give appropriate credit if I later used it on my blog. So I started saving links as bookmarks instead - which meant I ended up with links on my iPhone, Andre's iPhone, my work laptop, our PC upstairs, our PC downstairs... yep, that wasn't working out so well either.
Enter Pinterest. See a picture you like? Pin it, catalogue it, describe it, tag it, and save it onto your own nicely presented online notice board.
The only problem? According to the nice people at Pinterest (and also to Google in general), you can't pin images from an iPhone. It works from an iPad - and an iPhone app is in the works - but for now, if you're an iPhone user (and because in recent months I have become one-handed due to the requirement to carry a cute chubby baby girl around with me everywhere I go, browsing on an iPhone is the only option for me), then Pinterest is basically useless.
Unless, of course, you accidentally due to a stroke of sheer genius figure out how to pin images to Pinterest from an iPhone :-)
Oh all right then, enough of the talking, and on with the instructions...
First of all, you need to modify an existing bookmark on your iPhone. Select any old bookmark, and click Edit. Change the name of the bookmark to Pinterest (or Da Bomb, it's entirely up to you), and copy/paste the following into the URL window:
javascript:void((function(){var%20e=document.createElement('script'); e.setAttribute('type','text/javascript'); e.setAttribute('charset','UTF-8'); e.setAttribute('src','http://assets.pinterest.com/js/pinmarklet.js?r='+Math.random()*99999999);document.body.appendChild(e)})());
It looks like a chunk of random characters, but it comes out in a nice long line in the URL window. Then click Done, and Done.
This code is taken from Pinterest's blog, and is part of their instructions for using Pinterest on the iPad. I figured what the heck, I'd try it on the iPhone - and lo and behold, while it doesn't work the way they describe (it's supposed to add the Pinterest bookmarklet to the toolbar), it works just fine in a completely different way.
So here's what you do next. When you come across an image that you'd like to pin (in this example, I'm going to pin an image from my blog), click Bookmarks at the bottom of the window. Note that you shouldn't open a new window - stay on the webpage with your chosen image, and just hit the Bookmarks icon.
Locate your Pinterest bookmark, and click it. This runs some nifty kind of magic on the webpage with your chosen image, and pulls out all the images into a grid. Select the image you want to pin, and click Pin This.
You will then be taken to your Pinterest account, where you can add a category, description, and tags.
Freaking awesome, or what? Now, it's not a perfect solution. If you want to pin more than one image from the same page, you have to run the Pinterest bookmark every time. And sometimes you need to get the image onto its own page and then run Pinterest. And it doesn't work on Flickr. But I'm delighted to have figured out how to use Pinterest to pin images from the iPhone - Happy Christmas to me! Roll on the official app...
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Happy pinning, peeps :-)
Reader Comments (169)
nvr mind :) got it working again! Not sure how but it is.
It worked! You are amazing. Thank you!
Thanks for sharing it worked!!! smarty pants!
God bless you my child! That 'twas amazing!!!:)
This works a treat on my iPhone - like you I mostly browse in the middle
of the night one handed - so pinning on phone is essential!
Thanks so much!
Thanks so much!! I was so frustrated trying to figure it out and you still seem to be one of the few that posted up a solution. Really appreciate it!!
THANK YOU! I've been looking everywhere on how to pin from my iPad and iPhone!
Thank you so much for this!!
Thank you! Love u
Thank you! I'm not sure if I'm not using the iPhone 5 pinterest app right or not but I cannot pin from my phone. Following your instructions now I can. Thanks so much!
im bowing to you!
Thank u!
OMG you are such a life saver!!!! I have been looking for this forever!
Very helpful. Much more useful than the instructions on the Pinterest page. Thanks.
I LOVE you for this!!!!!!! Thank you so much!!!!! Muah!!!!!
This is amazing...thank you so much! I was racking my brain trying to find a way to pin when I came across your magic bookmark, lol. I can pin to my heart's content now. Thank again!
I just switched from an android phone to an iPhone, and I was DUMBFOUNDED to discover that I couldn't pin from my iPhone (something I did quite simply and ALL TOO often from my android). I thought Apple was supposed to be all things better?? Anyway, thank you SO MUCH. I was LOST without my ability to pin!!! :)
Seriously you rock!
What a clever solution to this ongoing issue! I just found you through a Google search. Pinterest still hasn't given iPod Touch & iPhone users a way to pin; you are a superhero!
Works!!! Life changing! Thank you!!