How to Organize on Pinterest.

I have a true love hate relationship with Pinterest. I use it all the time (probably even too much).  I'm obsessed with the outfit ideas I find, its an amazing way to keep up on trends, and find inspiration in the wardrobe department. I also am obsessed with crafting and cooking, so the DIY's and recipies are so so so useful. I drool over the wedding/party planning ideas. And don't get me wrong, I love myself a good cheesy tumblr-esque quote. The uses are really endless, and overall it's an amazing way to keep track of inspiration and ideas. Long story short, it rocks...most of the time.

That being said, I find that it really is hard to keep track of all the goodness. I went to find a tutorial on a volumized pony tail that I wanted to do, and I was left scrolling for a solid twenty or so. No good. Good news is, I finally found it, but I realized that I had some organizing to do.

Problem number one, I pretty much kept the pre-set Pinterest categories (which in retrospect was a bad move). I've added a few, but most of my pins are lumped under a few very broad headings.
I decided that by breaking my categories down into more specific areas, it will become easier to find what I need when I need it. For some pinners, this may not even be necessary; some people just love the pretty pictures. But for me, the links are just as important. I got the ambitious idea that I would organize all of my pins in one fell swoop.

Here's my Original Pinterest:

And that's where my hate part of the love/ hate relationship comes in. To edit a board, you have to edit each pin one by one. Death. So instead of trying to tackle my entire Pinterest (which I will do slowly but surely), I decided to work on my largest category: My Style. This contained all of my clothing, jewelry, hat/headband, makeup, hair, nails and style ideas. Alllll 800 or so of them. Luckily I'm at work, so I don't really have anything better to do. Hopefully this is a feature that Pinterest will fix soon... I've seen a ton of complaints about it so I know I'm not the only one. But until that day comes, here is the best way that I found to reorganize.


1. Select the board you'd like to work on. For me, like I said, it was My Style.

(p.s I took this screen shot when I was about 2 hours into working on it...there were more than 171 pins, I swear!!)
2. Decide how you want to break it down.  

I ended up with 9 new categories; My Style in the Winter, My Style in the Summer, My Style formal/ couture, My Style at Work and House Meeting, Misc. Art, Kicks, Interesting Ink, Hair and Makeup and Accessorize. These even could be further broken down (i.e Hair and makeup into 3: Hair, Makeup and Nails. Accessorize into 2 Hats and headbands, Jewelry ect.). In case you don't know how to create a new board, simply click the "add" icon in the top right, and select "create a board". Label it how you'd like.

Then comes the tricky part: Moving the pins.
I used firefox to do this. I also did it on a Dell (work computer), but I have a Macbook at home. This strategy is totally archaic but it's the best I could come up with. Yes, it's time consuming as well. But for me the rewards are great enough. So here we go:
3. Click the "Pinterest" icon in the top middle of the screen to get to your home screen. Then hover over your name in the right corner, and select "boards". This will bring you to all of your Pinterest boards. Click on the title of the board you'd like to edit.
 4. Hover over the first pin, and select "edit"

5. Which will bring you to the "edit pin" screen. Select the board you'd like to move the pin to and you're all set.

 The fastest way to do this, is to open about 10 or so tabs at a time (or as many as you can without getting dizzy), copying the URL of the board that you're editing and then clicking "paste and go". This works better than having to click the back button a bunch of times. Huge pain but what can you do.

Hope this inspires some organization!
Happy pinning!