How to Make a Pin on Pinterest (2026): Every Route and the Settings That Matter

Short answer: click Create at the top-left of Pinterest, upload an image, add a title, a description, a link and a board, then publish. That takes about a minute. The reason most Pins then sink without a trace has nothing to do with those steps — it is the fields people leave blank and a handful of settings nobody mentions.

So here are all three routes to making a Pin, and then the parts that actually decide whether anyone sees it.

The three routes

There is no single "make a Pin" button. Pinterest gives you three different doors, and they produce quite different results.

Route	What it does	Best for
Upload	You supply the image or video from your device	Anything you made or own
Save from URL	Pinterest pulls the images off a web page you name	Your own site's posts
Save Extension	A browser button that grabs an image from the page you are on	Quick saves while browsing

The first is the one that matters if you are publishing your own work. The other two copy an image that already exists somewhere on the web, which is convenient and carries a catch covered further down.

Route one: upload

On desktop, from Pinterest's own instructions:

1. Click Create at the top-left of your screen. On a business account, open the hamburger menu and choose Create Pin.
2. Click the upload icon to pick an image, or drag and drop it into the window.
3. Fill in the Pin's information — title, description, link, board.
4. Click the pencil icon on your image to edit it: add text, change the aspect ratio.
5. Click Publish.

Two details in that flow are worth pulling out, because they change how you work.

You can select up to ten images at once, and each one becomes its own separate Pin. Not a carousel, not one Pin with ten photos — ten Pins. That is the native way to publish a batch, and most people upload one at a time without realising.

To combine several images and videos into a single video Pin, you have to use the Pinterest app. The desktop composer will not do it.

The fields that decide who sees it

A Pin surfaces because Pinterest matched text to a search. Skip the text and you have published a picture into a search engine with nothing to match on.

Title. Pinterest's spec guide allows up to 100 characters, and notes that depending on the device only the first 40 may show in people's feeds. Write for those 40. Front-load the thing a person would actually type.

Description. Up to 800 characters. Here is the part that surprises people: descriptions do not appear in the home feed or the search feed. They are not there to be read by the scroller. Pinterest says plainly that descriptions "are used by our algorithm to determine relevance for delivery" — so the description is written for the matching engine, not for the audience. That is not a licence to stuff keywords; it is a reason not to leave the box empty, which is what most people do.

Link. Optional, and the only thing that turns a Pin into traffic.

Board. Choose one, or create one. The board gives Pinterest context about what the Pin is about.

Tag related topics. You can add up to 10. Free, structured signal, almost universally ignored.

The specifications

Pinterest's published spec guide is written around ad formats, but the composer fields and the image handling are the same ones your organic Pins go through.

• Aspect ratio: 2:3 is the recommendation — 1000 x 1500 pixels. Pinterest warns that Pins taller than 2:3 "might get cut off in people's feeds."
• File types: PNG or JPEG for images.
• Maximum file size: 20 MB on desktop, 32 MB in-app.
• Video length: minimum four seconds. That four-second floor is the single most common reason an upload is rejected outright, which our guide to video Pins goes into properly.

One processing note that matters if you care how your work looks: every uploaded image is converted to a standard 8-bit RGB JPEG. Pinterest recommends uploading PNG in sRGB to avoid losing quality in that conversion, and says custom colour profiles are not supported and may shift your colours.

The white-background trap

This one is documented and almost never mentioned, and it hits product photography hardest.

Pinterest applies a faint tint to image Pins with white or black backgrounds, to stop them disappearing into the app's own background. In Pinterest's description, a Pin with a white or near-white background gets, in light mode, "a faint black layer (#000000 at 4% opacity)" applied on top of the creative. A near-black background gets a white layer at 10% opacity in dark mode.

It applies to organic Pins as well as ads. It does not apply to video.

So the clean white studio shot you exported — the format almost every product listing uses — is not shown exactly as you made it. Four percent is subtle, but if you have carefully matched a white background to a white brand palette, Pinterest is quietly greying it. Pins built on a coloured, textured or lifestyle background are unaffected, which is one more practical argument for not simply publishing a cut-out on white.

Drafts, and their expiry

Pinterest lets you save a Pin as a draft, with four constraints that catch people out:

• Drafts expire 30 days after you first store them. After that they cannot be retrieved.
• You cannot edit a draft across devices. Start one in the phone app and you must finish it there.
• To publish several drafts at once, use desktop. You can hold up to 50 drafts there and publish them together.
• You need at least 100 MB of free storage on your phone to create a draft in the app.

Scheduling, free, inside Pinterest

If you have a business account, the composer shows a Publish later option, and Pinterest states you can schedule up to 30 days in advance. No third-party tool required.

Worth knowing before you pay for anything: the scheduling problem on Pinterest is largely solved natively and for free. What is not solved natively is having something good to schedule — producing a steady supply of distinct, well-shot, well-captioned images is where the actual work sits.

The AI toggle

The composer now includes Mark as AI-Modified — toggles for whether the content was made completely or partly with AI, or includes an AI-generated person.

Declaring it yourself is one of the ways Pinterest applies its AI label, and that label is smaller and better placed than most people fear: it appears in close-up after someone clicks the Pin, not on the tile in the feed or in search. We went through exactly what Pinterest does and does not say about this in does Pinterest label AI-generated Pins.

Routes two and three: the copying catch

Save from URL asks for a web address, loads the images it finds on that page, and lets you turn them into Pins. The Save Extension is a browser button that does the same thing for the page you are looking at.

Both are genuinely useful for your own content — point them at your own blog post and you have a Pin in seconds.

Point them at a retailer's product listing and you have a problem. The image on an Amazon or Etsy listing is someone's copyrighted work, and the affiliate programme agreements are specific about what you may do with it — Amazon's, for instance, prohibits altering the image, which a 2:3 crop with a headline on it plainly does. We laid out the actual clauses in can you use Amazon product images on Pinterest.

The tool will happily let you do it. The agreement is what stops you.

Making the image in the first place

Everything above is the publishing half. The harder half is having an image worth publishing — vertical, on-brand, legible at thumbnail size, and yours.

A disclosure: we make Pinstark, so read this as the vendor describing its own tool. You paste a product link and it generates a pin pack in about a minute — newly generated photography of that product in a range of styles, editorial text overlays, and titles and descriptions written for Pinterest search, at 2:3. Because the imagery is generated rather than copied, what you publish is a new image rather than a retailer's photo. Pinstark publishes to Pinterest on every plan including the free one; scheduling ahead starts on Pro.

If you would rather do it with AI tools by hand, our guide to making Pinterest pins with AI compares the routes. And once you have the production side solved, Pinterest Trends is how you decide what to make next.

Frequently asked questions

How do I make a Pin on Pinterest? Click Create at the top-left, upload your image, add a title, description, link and board, then publish. On a business account, open the hamburger menu and select Create Pin.

Can I make several Pins at once? Yes. Upload up to ten images in one go and each becomes a separate Pin. You can also hold up to 50 drafts on desktop and publish them together.

What size should a Pin be? 2:3, which is 1000 x 1500 pixels. Pinterest warns that anything taller than 2:3 may be cropped in the feed.

Do I need a business account? Not to make a Pin. You do need one to schedule a Pin for later, and to see analytics.

Does the description show on the Pin? No. Pinterest states descriptions do not appear in the home feed or search feed — they are used by the algorithm to judge relevance. Write it anyway; it is doing the matching.

Can I pin a product photo from Amazon or Etsy? Technically the tools allow it. The affiliate agreements generally do not, because a Pin crops the image and adds text to it. Generate or shoot your own instead.