You can see more of our bathroom here!
Anytime I share inspiration images, I get a slew of questions about how to even FIND these kinds of beautiful imagery. I guess I’m still old school because I turn to Pinterest. But whenever I say that I usually hear a bunch about how Pinterest never shows anything cool for them. Well, we can’t have that. So today, I wanted to share just a few ways I use Pinterest around here because it is such a great way to find and images that resonate with you, that you’ll want to re-pin and reference later.
Let’s use my staircase design board as a reference. I started this board because (you guessed it), we are going to be making changes to the staircases in our NC house before we move in. A great place to start is to do a quick search like “staircase ideas,” and start your scroll.
If you find a pin you love, click on it (don’t forget to save) and scroll down. It will show you “more like this.” There will be some duds in the mix, but usually they have a very similar aesthetic. You can also add a note to a pin when you save it. This way, you can remember what you liked about it. Sometimes I save a photo just for the paint color, or the way the end table is styled.
Once you have a few ideas saved to a board, go to the board and click on “more ideas.” Pinterest is going to curate even more images that look similar to what you’re already loving and pinning to that board. Click the “+” over the images you love and they will add directly to your board.
Just by doing these things, you’re going to be training your main feed to show you things that fit within your preferred aesthetic. The more active you are on Pinterest, the more fine tuned your explore page will become towards your style. Save the images you love!
But Pinterest can do even MORE than save images. It does an incredible job at sourcing products you love, OR it will give some pretty good dupes (look-a-likes). Check this out–If you click on an image and hover over it, items in the photo will pop up. I’m going to click on table lamps and see what happens.
And Voila. Pinterest did all the heavy lifting and found some really comparable lamps to the one in our bedroom.
If you click on one, it will show you similar products.
You can also pin specific items and click “view similar products.”
This is one of our favorite ways to find dupes.
If you use Instagram like me, you can also pin images directly from Instagram by tapping the 3 dots, share to, and open the Pinterest app. Sometimes websites will have a pin it button where you can save images directly onto Pinterest. If they don’t, you can create your own pin by clicking “create pin” and dragging and dropping an image in, or click save from site and paste a URL in.
I hope this was helpful! We use Pinterest a lot for sourcing, but I also love curating images I’m finding inspiration in. I’m especially using it to loosely “virtually design” our NC home to tide me over until I can get my hands on it.
Is anybody else still using Pinterest these days?
This is such an incredibly helpful post! Thank you!
I got lost on the “click and hover over image” where it shows you the item or similar ones that you can buy. I’m on mobile so there isn’t a hover of the image option? Can anyone help. I’ve been Pinterest stalking a mirror for months and can’t ever seem to find a place to purchase it!
If the image has the option, if you click on the pin it should just come up with the dots on the products. There you can click on them to view similar products.
I’ve given up on Pinterest.
In your example, you are searching for something non-purchasable, like a staircase. Or heading into Pinterest with an ideal image already.
But say I search on Pinterest for floating bathroom vanity. Pinterest USED to show me gorgeous inspiration images of bathrooms with floating vanities. Now it shows me a page filled with every bathroom vanity HomeDepot and Etsy sell. If I wade through that a while, I can find a few inspiration pics. But they are very few and far between. I agree, once you find an image you like, you get somewhat better results in the “More Like This” section below a picture (though still 50/50 with ads). But with so few inspiration images in the first search, I struggle to find an image from the beginning that is the style I am looking for.
I understand they want to make money off the site, and I am fine with some advertisements being added. And I think their shop similar items feature is a brilliant way of monetizing their site. But when the search results are all just shopping results, Pinterest loses the very functionality that make it useful.
Seriously, go put floating bathroom vanity in the Pinterest search bar and tell me it is anything other than a shopping site now.
I love Pinterest! It’s the only social media I didn’t delete a year ago and it is really amazing. I’ve been on Pinterest since the days where you had to be invited by someone that had an account and had to wait to be “approved” (thankfully that feature didn’t last long!).
Pinterest is a fantastic tool for fun and for business, which I use it for both. Thanks for sharing your tip and tricks!
I use pinterest, in much the manner that you describe. Things may have changed in many ways, but the image search capacity in pinterest remains really good.
I just have two issues with it:
1) I find myself very easily getting into a pinterest rut–maybe my taste is too specialized but pretty soon, I find myself having exhausted all of the images that fit what I’m interested in and then I just see the same thing over and over again. Maybe this is a good thing–infiinite scrolls are dangerously addictive!–but it can make pinterest a little bit boring.
2) A lot of the links are to various link farms (not sure the proper term, but those websites which just aggregate a bunch of content seemingly at random) or are to broken links. There’s nothing more disappointing than trying to follow the link from a particularly intriguing image and seeing that it goes nowhere.
But those caveats aside, pinterest is a great way to get started on a project or just explore. I have a board that is called “new house ideas” or some such, which is just where I pin stuff that is inspirational for me kindof at random and it has been a good way to get a sense of trends in what I’m drawn to and how my own sense of style has evolved.