Have you ever found yourself in any of these situations?
- You come across the perfect blog post or web page that you’d like to pin to your Pinterest account and share with the Pinterest community but there isn’t an image to pin.
- You come across a site that hasn’t heard of the importance of having good pinnable images that really represent what the article is about. They do something like use a picture of a cat to represent current trends of the stock market. What the heck!
- You know you have some older great content that you would love to share on Pinterest but don’t have time to create pinnable images.
What do you do when no pinnable images are found?
Here’s the solution!
The most obvious solution to the situations above is to:
- Take a screen shot of the page you want to pin
- Save the screen shot to your hard drive
- Copy the URL of the page you want to pin
- Upload the image as a pin
- Open the pin
- Click the pins edit button
- Paste the copied URL into the URL box
***UPDATE***
Since the publication of this post ShotPin has stopped working 🙁 If anyone finds an alternative PLEASE let me know.
Who’s got time for that?!??! Not me and I’m almost 100% sure you’d rather be spending your time in other ways.
I have found a quick, easy and free solution for you! It’s called ShotPin.
Shot Pin is a Google Chrome browser extension that’s a breeze to install and to use.
Here’s a peek at how it works:
The ShotPin tool will appear at the end of your search bar in Chrome
When you come across a page that does’t have a pinnable image or one that doesn’t have an image that represent the content well, click the ShotPin button.
Highlight the portion of the page that you would like to turn into a pin by dragging your mouse over it.
Click the pin button at the bottom right side of the selected area.
From there, the screenshot can be pinned directly to your Pinterest account and the URL where the screen shot came from will be attached to the image. Selet the board and add your description and pin it. Your pin will link back to the source of the image. Easy, huh?
You can find ShotPin in Google Chrome Web Store. Simply click the add chrome extension button to install this awesome tool. (Click here)
Here’s a quick video to see it in action.
A Pinteresting question
My Pinterest pal Amber Trussel, from A Jewelry Jar asked “Do you know if there is a way to star, mark, group, certain boards by others so that I can find them quickly?”
This made me think of ShotPin. You can use shot pin to make a pinnable image of a board you want to keep close tabs on. Sometimes people pins such awesome stuff you wamt to make sure you don’t miss a thing.
Will be using shot pin?
28 Comments
Brilliant article on ShotPin! As usual, you’ve delivered more excellent and actionable content to your audience, Cynthia. Thank you so much! You’re making Pinterest that much more of an easy-to-use marketing tool, interesting social media outlet and just plain fun platform for us all!
Thanks, Tanya! It is fun, isn’t it 🙂
Thanks for sharing this article and tool Cynthia. Definitely makes my life a lot easier instead of doing the whole screen capture thing as well.Your article gave me an idea that people have been asking me about about, “How to get Facebook posts onto Pinterest?”
I tested this out with Shotpin after reading your article, and this will make it much easier since Facebook doesn’t allow direct the pin bookmarklet too to work.
But all I have to do is get the Facebook post URL and then use ShotPin and it will now automatically redirect to the post url. Such a time saver for all! You’re amazing Cynthia thanks for sharing this!
Vincent, what a great idea!!! I had never though about using ShotPin for pinning Facebook posts, cross promoting os sooo important, you’re a genius!
Hi Cynthia,
I found your work with Pinterest in the last couple of days and have started to catch up on podcast episodes. I’ve made some good notes from them already, so thank you very much :-).
Your site actually provides a good example of how modern responsive web designs that are designed to work on narrow, portrait smartphone screens have a built-in pinnable view in desktop browsers which can be accessed before taking the screenshot simply by dragging the right edge of the browser window in to make a tall-thin view. I have made a pin showing what I mean:
http://pinterest.com/pin/61080138669115727/
For someone who knows a tiny bit of CSS, it is also possible to tweak the view in a browser like chrome or firefox which lets you edit the page easily. I made another version of that pin with text and images boosted in size so they are still legible in the pin thumbnail when it is sitting on a board in Pinterest:
http://pinterest.com/pin/61080138669115835/
I could make a quick screencast showing how to do that for a non-techy if anyone wants that (hit me up here or in the pin comments).
Oh, I used your web page for my pins. I hope that is okay. I have linked back to this article from them. Let me know if not and I will delete them immediately.
Thanks again!
Best,
Andrew
Andrew,
Thanks so much for listening to the podcast, I’m so glad you’re finding it helpful.
Thanks so much for pinning my site! What a great idea. If you’re up to making a screencast of how to do it that would be great. If you’d like, I could use it in an upcoming blog post with full credit and links back to you.
Hi Cynthia,
Thanks for the great response. I’m still playing around with the technique of editing web pages in the browser before taking a screenshot of them to improve the impact and legibility of the resulting pin. There are several of my experiments alongside modified screenshot pins of your latest post and your front page on the same board:
http://pinterest.com/pin/61080138669126502/
http://pinterest.com/pin/61080138669124648/
I’ll get back in touch when I have the screencast ready.
Thanks,
Andrew
Hi Cynthia, Thanks for the information about Shot Pin. Today I found a recipe I wanted to pin and there was no picture with it. So I installed Google Chrome, added the free Shot Pin extension, and made a pin! Wow, it was a lot easier than I thought it would be! Thanks a lot! Leni
[…] there’s a much easier method. Cynthia wrote a wonderful article about a Chrome extension known as ShotPin, and it has been a lifesaver for me in so many […]
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Brilliant! Thank you so much for this – we don’t host images on our website, so we can’t pin straight from it, we have to create images first and then upload them to pinterest. Same goes for pinners who want to pin from our site. But not any more! Just tried it and it works a treat. Great tip.
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Hi Cynthia –
I’ve been using ShotPin for a year or so with no problems. A month or so ago, it started acting hinky, but I could reload the page and it would kick in. But in the past week, I’m unable to get it to move from Step 1 to Step 2 (display screenshot so I can upload to Pinterest). I tried to reinstall the extension, but get an “Item not found. This item may have been removed by its author.” message. Woe is me. Have you had any similar experiences with ShotPin’s functionality? I hope you have good news or an alternative suggestion. Like you, I got hooked! 😉 See you in class on the 30th. Really looking forward to it. Thanks.
Hi Jody!
Un fortunately it has stopped working for me too 🙁 I’m on a serious hunt to find a replacement. I’ll keep you updated if I come across one.
Can’t wait until the workshop begins!
Shotpin…you leave me after I just found you…I’m heartbroken. Following in hopes Cynthia finds a another Shotpin…
Shot Pin is gone now from the chrome store but I found “Pin My Screen” which does the same job well.
Thanks Chris!
What happened to ShotPin? It doesn’t work any more and Google said it might have been removed by the owner and does not show up on a search in the Google Store
I’m so disappointed that this no longer works. I’m looking for a replacement but nothing has measured up yet.
Sorry, didn’t read last posts, I found QuickPin, it allows you to pin from a Facebook page, easier than ShotPin. IT’s a Google extension
I don’t know how I missed this article until now, since I’d swear I’ve read everything on Oh So Pinteresting. But I wanted to let people know that Pin4Ever has a free tool called Pin Anything which will let you take a custom screenshot, choose a board with the drop-down box, and pin it (with the page’s url automatically filled in). You can type in a description, or highlight words from the article before you click Pin Anything to have them filled in automatically.
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[…] Can you take screenshots on Pinterest? […]