What You Can Do With Images You Don’t Want Saving To Pinterest

Posted by Lisa | Individual Obligation on September 4th, 2019

There are lots of ways to improve your blog’s Pinterest strategy. Especially if you blog on WordPress as there are plenty of plugins to help make your life easier. As well as grow your traffic and followers.

My favorite Pinterest plugin, hands-down is WP Tasty Pins. Whilst it sounds like it is aimed more at food bloggers. It really works for any niche that focuses on using Pinterest images in their blog posts.

Why? Because it helps me do all the fancy customization of the pins I embed into my blog posts without having to edit code. Meaning it is a huge time-saving and oh-so-easy-to-use.

This is especially true for when you want to block the pinning of certain images. So they cannot be saved onto Pinterest.

Sounds crazy, right? Why on earth would I NOT want people to share my blog post images to Pinterest?

The answer is simple - I only want people to save my Pinterest optimized images. You know, the ones that are overlaid with text to help you understand what the pin is about. That also have carefully crafted Pinterest descriptions and are the right size. (Think tall images!)

I’d rather not have things like my tiny 400x400 square featured images saved to Pinterest. They look awful and pixelated because of their size and compression. 

Not to mention that these square type images get lost in the feed so easily. So the majority of people will just scroll right past it. And Pinterest will bury it with the lack of engagements because of this.

How To Block Images From Being Saved To Pinterest

So, how do you block images from being pinned?

Well, there’s a little feature called “nopin” that Pinterest added as an HTML code that you can add to your images.

For example, if you edit your blog post’s code in WordPress. It might look a bit like this:

img src=”example-image.jpg” nopin=”nopin”

The problem with this is that you have to edit code. Which can be daunting and not to mention fiddly. 

The other issue is that you have to find and edit every image you want to add this code to. So if you have a big blog post with lots of images you don’t want saving to Pinterest. It could take you quite a while.

Like if I did this with my blog post on 115 places to get free stock images. I would have to add this code to over 60+ images. Which would take f.o.r.e.v.e.r.

Thankfully it is so much easier with WP Tasty Pins. I can just click a button for the image I want disabled. Which is much faster if you ask me.

How You Decide To Handle This Is Up To You & Your Audience

Either way, it really depends on how important it is for your readers to only pin your Pinterest optimized images.

Because you might think people will ignore those smaller images and go for your bigger and high-quality pinterest optimized images. But I know for a fact, that from time to time, someone will decide that they want to pin those smaller square images. Or worse, my 800x400 wide images.

Whilst this won’t hurt your Pinterest account. It will mean that the pin will be less likely to get engagement and go viral. And well, we really want to maximize our chances that every share could be the next viral pin.

Which is why you might want to spend time figuring this out for your blog. So that when people do share your content they share something that is more likely to gain traction.

Blocking the pinning of certain images is just a tiny part of optimizing your blog for Pinterest though. So if you are looking for more Pinterest plugins to optimize with. Then check out this list of 8+ essential suggestions right here.