Protect Your Photos From Being Pinned On Pinterest

Ok, let me start out by saying that I absolutely LOVE Pinterest, and you all have my permission to pin anything you find on my blog to Pinterest.  Seriously, pin away!

That said, there are some people who do not want their images pinned to Pinterest for one reason or another. Luckily for them, Pinterest has a very simple way to protect your photos from being pinned!

Yes, I do see the irony in having that “Pin It” button right there, thanks

A lot of people use Pinterest, but I don’t think every person who uses Pinterest actually reads through the terms when they sign up. Cuz seriously, who does that?! Reminds me of that Eddie Izzard GIF I saw on Tumblr the other day

Anyway, the point is there was a bunch of hullaballoo about Pinterest’s terms recently (I’m sure you can Google it and find all the details; I’m not going to go into them here). Basically, people were very worried that once an image is pinned to Pinterest, they no longer have control over it.

Some of those people are professional photographers who wanted to retain rights to their photos, some of those people are moms who didn’t want pictures of their kids floating around the internet, some of those people are bloggers whose images were pinned, but the link was manually changed to some other completely unrelated site…

Whatever the reason, sometimes it just makes sense to keep some of your stuff off Pinterest. (Stacy from Not Just A Housewife had a crazy experience with a staged photo that was pinned and taken out of context a while ago)

---

So if you fall into any of those categories, there are two options for you.

1. Prevent a specific image on your site from being pinned to Pinterest

Before I pin anything from anyone’s blog, I always try to check their terms to see if they say anything about whether or not they would like their stuff pinned. And I see something like this ALL THE TIME:

“Please feel free to pin any images of projects you find on this site as long as the pin links back to my blog. However, please do not pin any images of my children, husband, or any other family members.”

Fair. Totally fair.

But if you’re worried that people won’t read your terms before pinning, or won’t respect your wishes, here’s a little piece of code to help you out.

nopin = "nopin"

Just add that code in the HTML of your post, inside your img tag, and that specific image will not be available for users to pin. When you are writing a new post or editing an old one, you can usually view the HTML of your post by clicking the HTML view tab. Then look for the img tag of your photo; it should look something like this:

<img style="border: 0px;" src="http://practicallyfunctional.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/signature2.png" width="206" height="74" nopin = "nopin" />

Just copy that nopin code in right before the closing bracket and your image will be protected!

If I used this code to create my signature image at the bottom of the post, it would make it so that no one can pin my signature from this post. The graphic image at the top of this post would still be available for pinning, as would everything else on my blog, but this signature would be excluded from possible pins.

2. Prevent every image on your site from being pinned to Pinterest 

If you don’t want anything from your website to show up on Pinterest ever, you need the following code:

<meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" />

You will need access to the HTML of your entire blog in order to do this, not just a single post. And you need to be VERY CAREFUL when editing HTML; you can do serious damage. You can access the HTML of your blog in a Blogger blog by going into Templates and clicking the Edit HTML button. You can access the HTML of your self-hosted WordPress blog by going into the Appearance tab on the side and choosing Editor, then selecting your Header file. Unfortunately, if you have a WordPress.com blog, you don’t have access to edit your HTML and must use the code in the previous example.

Once you have your HTML open, search for the following tag: </head>

Once you find that line of code, press return a few times to make a few empty lines just before it, and copy in the code above. Save your file, and you’re done!

If you can’t find your HTML files or the </head> tag, just shoot me an email through the Contact form; I can help!

If anyone tries to pin an image from your site they will see a message that says “This site doesn’t allow pinning to Pinterest. Please contact the owner with any questions. Thanks for visiting!”

If you want to customize the message that appears you can use the following code instead.

<meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" description="Sorry, no pinning of images on this site please!" />

Just change the description bit to whatever you want to say. Make sure to leave the quotes there though, they’re important!

UPDATE: Claire mentioned another great reason to use this code in the comments, and I just wanted to make sure you all saw it…Bloggers who feature other bloggers’ work from link parties etc. could use this image-specific code to make sure that anyone who wants to pin a featured project does so from the original blog, not from your Featured post. I always try to leave a reminder in my Feature posts to click over to the source before pinning, but using this code would be a great extra measure just in case

---

So there you have it. Next time you post an adorable photo of your baby you can protect it from being wildly thrown about the interwebs with this simple tip! (Anyone seen the “success kid” meme?)

I don’t want to start any huge debates or anything, but what are your feelings about your images on Pinterest? Are all your images fair game, or now that you know you can exclude a few choice photos, will you be doing that from now on?

In all honesty, I haven’t used any of this code so far. Right now my blog only has pictures of me, my husband, my cats, and my projects, and it’s ok with all of them if their photos are up on the internet. Well, the projects don’t get a vote, but yes, I asked the cats. They sort of just sat there, which I took as complete apathy for and disinterest in the whole situation

But I might think about protecting some of my photos if/when we have kids and if/when photos of them show up on the blog…

 I link up at these awesome parties!