About Pinterest

Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information like recipes, home, style, motivation, and inspiration on the internet using images and, on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboards.

Features and content

The creators behind Pinterest summarized the service as a "catalogue of ideas" that inspires users to "go out and do that thing", although that it is not an image-based "social network". It also has a very large fashion profile. In later years, Pinterest has also been described as a "visual search engine".

Pinterest consists mainly of "pins" and "boards". A pin is an image that has been linked from a website or uploaded. Pins saved from one user's board can be saved to someone else's board, a process known as "repinning". Boards are collections of pins dedicated to a theme such as quotations, travel, or weddings. Boards with multiple ideas can have different sections that further contain multiple pins. Users can follow and unfollow other users as well as boards, which would fill the "home feed".

Content can also be found outside Pinterest and similarly uploaded to a board via the "Save" button, which can be downloaded to the bookmark bar on a web browser, or be implemented by a webmaster directly on the website. It was originally called the "Pin it" button but was renamed in 2016 to "Save" due to international expansion, making the site more intuitive to new users.

In August 2016, Pinterest launched a video player that lets users and brands upload and store clips of any length straight to the site.