Backup Pins and Boards from Pinterest, Detect Duplicated Pins and Download Pin Images

Recently I have been doing some spring cleaning to my online life and I started to use Pinterest to consolidate all the articles, videos and pictures that are important to me that don't quite fit in Facebook or Twitter.

After a couple of days moving everything from multiple sources to Pinterest, I felt very uncomfortable with the fact that Pinterest was starting to become pretty important to me. So I thought about a doing a backup of the content every 3 months. First, I searched for a similar option to 'get my data' that Facebook and Twitter have but with no avail. Pinterest doesn't provide a easy way of getting your data for backup. Next, I looked around the web for some third party tools to do it, but even if there are some, most focus only in getting the pictures and not the URLs that each pin points to, and since I pin plenty of articles, it didn't work for me. I did find a paid tool but it asked me to use firefox, disable updates and pay, so.. emm not for me. This was starting to look way too difficult so I decided to look into the Pinterest API and after a couple of hours testing it I couldn't fix an error just in the last request... So I went back to zero.

I was about to despair and started to think about moving things out again from Pinterest when I considered a more rudimentary way: A simple web scrapping. So I set up a scrapping tool that I developed and managed to download all my Pinterest data to a pretty excel file! It wasn't easy because Pinterest has a funny behaviour that removes earlier HTML code as soon as it's invisible from the user so I had to program a workaround for that. After I got all the data, I could also download the full images of each pin to a local folder in my computer and I could also detect duplicated pins easily. So I was finally happy! :)

I can't release any tool to do it because it involves some manual manual work and it uses multiple tools. But if you want to have your Pinterest boards and pins backed up just send me and email to c26000a@gmail.com and I will gladly do it for free for you.

Ah, and this is my Pinterest page in case you want to check it out: www.pinterest.com/c26000.