I’ve been reading all about Pinterest and while it looks interesting, I have a site dedicated to custom HDR photographic retouching work and I frankly don’t want my imagery showing up on that site, even if the argument is that it’ll produce more traffic for me. My images, my copyright, my site. So can I block those pesky Pinterest pinners, Dave?
Easy does it, pal. Before you throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater you do realize that the bane of all social networks is the same thing that makes the compelling and interesting too, right? Sharing. Instead of preventing Pinterest users from helping you gain additional visibility by pinning your images on the Pinterest site, perhaps you should instead consider adding a small copyright notice on the images themselves?
You’re not alone, however, and one of the greatest challenges that an image-based site like Pinterest has is respecting the copyright of images that users — usually with the best of intentions — republish to the site. I’ve done it myself, posting things like book covers or movie publicity posters so I can share favorites with my friends.
Whether or not you’re okay with Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter folk reposting your photos, it does turn out that Pinterest has heard the complaints and now has a simple way for you to stop people pinning your content.
Just add the following line to the “head” section of any page you don’t want pinned:
Do so and when someone clicks on the “Pin It” button, here’s what they’ll see:

A simple and straightforward solution, and if you have a blog or site based on an entry template, you can add the line of code to the template and every page will automatically be unpinnable.
Oh, and Pinterest says “Pinterest respects the intellectual property rights of others and expects its users to do the same.”
Good luck!
[…] Dave Taylor explains why he did it for one of his sites and how to do it for yours. […]
How do I delete someone from following me?
Thanks Dave. Great tip. I help a few photographers out and I will pass this along to them for sure.
This is a great tip. I wonder if there is a way stop people from grabbing a screenshot and then upload it to pinterest.
wow, this is a GREAT tip! My gf is a photographer and has been worried about this same thing. Especially with the recent articles on their copyright infringment issues. Gonna share it with her.
Thanks for this, Dave! I’m a huge fan of using Pinterest for marketing, but I know some photographers and artists don’t want anything to do with it, and would rather block their images from being pinned. I will point them toward this post. Gracias!
–b.