Hi Dave, I am trying to figure out how to take pictures from iPhoto and get them onto a Pinterest Board. Any ideas how to do that?
There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that this is easily done, but the bad news is that Pinterest isn’t a built-in “sharing” option from Apple’s iPhoto application, so you’re going to have to do this one by one. No easy shortcuts! That’s okay, though, because what makes this a bit of a hassle for you conversely means that other people who you follow on Pinterest don’t publish 30-50 photos at a time, flooding the system with their (potentially) banal imagery.
So it’s one of those karmic balance sort of features, I suppose.
Plus, if you look at the export options in the iPhoto program, you’ll see that they’re all able to handle albums of photos rather than individual photo postings. By contrast, Pinterest has “pinboards” but I’d argue it’s still really more set up for individual photo postings rather than for large collections of images.
Be that as it may, the current functionality of Pinterest definitely does not support people uploading a stack of images at the same time, so let’s look at the photo-by-photo steps required, okay?
First off, in iPhoto, highlight the photo or photos you’d like to post:
My natural tendency is to now Cmd-Click on the selection, but in iPhoto that’s not the way to get to the export feature (remember you can’t “share” because iPhoto doesn’t interoperate with Pinterest). That’s accessible off the “File” menu, as shown:
Once you’re ready to export, I strongly recommend that you resize the photos down to make the upload faster and because 99% of people are only going to look at the thumbnail anyway. That’s all accessible in the export dialog window:
As you can see, I use JPEG (which has built-in filesize compression) but specify high quality output, then specify “medium” as the resultant image size. Don’t worry, it doesn’t touch the images in the iPhoto library!
When you’ve set things as you desire, click on “Export” and it’ll ask where you want to save things. That can be anywhere on your system, just pay attention so you can find them!
Exported? Then you’re done with iPhoto and can quit the app.
Now on your Desktop or somewhere else on your Mac, you’ll have individual photos:
Now switch over to your Web browser and look on the top right of Pinterest for the control section:
Click on “Add +” as shown to upload and add your newly exported photos, and a window pops up:
Click on “Upload a Pin” and, yes, you’ll need to go through these steps one at a time for each of the photos you want to upload. Once you click a little file selection dialog box will open up:
Click “Choose File” and pick one of the photographs you just exported. You’ll then be in the main add a pin dialog, which offers a selection of pinboards you’ve already created (I’ll use “Places I’d Rather Be…” as shown) and a box where you can enter a description or other useful information for followers:
All looks good? Click on the red “Pin It” button and it’ll upload the photo and show you the end result:
Done. Now, lather, rinse, repeat for each of the photos you’d like to add to your Pinterest account.
Oh, and if you’d like to follow me on Pinterest, just go here: Dave Taylor on Pinterest and click “Follow”. Thanks!
When I click on the Add button on my Pinterest board it only offers me the option to invite people to follow. I don’t see a way to add an image from my iphoto library or any other drive on my computer.
Hi Dave, I did the above and it worked when I look at it on my Mac but the image is blank when I look at in Pinterest on my iPhone. Any thoughts?
Ramsey
figured it out!