Leaving Pinterest? Back Up the Pins You Care About First

People leave Pinterest for all sorts of reasons: less screen time, a fresh start, a platform that stopped feeling useful. Whatever the reason, the boards go with the account, and years of saved references can disappear in the time it takes to confirm a dialog. This article is a triage method for the week before you close the door, so that the pins you will actually miss are sitting on your own drive when you do.

What deactivating and deleting actually do

Pinterest offers two exits. Deactivation hides your profile and boards but keeps the data, so you can come back. Deletion is permanent, and once it completes your boards, pins and profile cannot be recovered. Pinterest's help pages describe both options and the waiting period involved at help.pinterest.com.

The distinction matters for backup planning. If you are only stepping away, deactivation is reversible and a backup is a comfort rather than a necessity. If you intend to delete, treat everything on your boards as gone the moment you confirm.

One more fact shapes what follows. Pins you saved from other people were never yours. You were bookmarking their content on Pinterest's servers, and saving the pin to a board granted you no ownership. Pins you uploaded yourself are different: the content licence you gave Pinterest lets the platform host and display your work, but the copyright stays with you, as the Terms of Service make clear. That split, your uploads versus everyone else's, is the backbone of the triage.

Step one: decide which boards matter

Do not try to save everything. A typical account has boards that were active for a month in 2021 and never opened since. Go through your board list once and sort each into three piles:

Pile	Description	Action
Keep	You open it regularly or it holds work you made	Back up fully
Skim	A few pins you would miss, the rest is noise	Save selected pins only
Let go	You would not notice if it vanished	Nothing

Be honest about the third pile. The point of a backup is to hold what you would look for later, not to recreate the whole account on a hard drive. Most people end up with two or three boards in the first pile and a dozen pins scattered across the second.

Step two: save your own uploads first

Start with anything you created and uploaded: your photos, your videos, your designs. These are the pins where you have every right to keep a copy and every reason to, because for some of them Pinterest may hold the only clean version left.

Open each one, copy the pin URL and paste it into KeepPin. For a video pin you get the MP4 at the resolution Pinterest stored; for an image you get the original upload rather than a scaled preview. The image downloader page is convenient when a board is all photographs. Name each file with what it is and the date, and keep these in a folder called own-uploads so they are never confused with references.

If some of your own pins live on secret boards, a downloader cannot see them, because it visits Pinterest as a logged-out guest. Why you can't download pins from secret boards covers the workarounds: use Pinterest's own save option for images, or make the board public for the few minutes it takes to fetch the files and then set it back.

Step three: references you cannot find elsewhere

Now the harder pile. Among the pins you saved from other people, a few are irreplaceable in practice: the tutorial that no longer exists anywhere else, the reference photo whose source site went dark, the recipe video you have cooked from a dozen times. Those are worth saving. The pin that is simply a link to a shop or an article is not; save the outbound link in a notes file and move on.

For each reference pin, do two things. Save the media, and record where it came from. A downloaded file carries no memory of its origin, so a line in a text file with the pin URL, the creator's name or handle, and a few words about why you kept it is the only thing that will let you credit the source or find the creator later. The simplest format is one line per pin:

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/1234567890123456789/ | mariasstudio | open shelving reference for kitchen

Working through a board this way is a manual job, one pin per request, and it goes faster with a two-window layout and a URL list you fill in before downloading. Saving a whole board one pin at a time lays out that routine in detail, including how to resume after a break. Pace yourself rather than racing; the per-minute limits described in why KeepPin limits download speed exist to stop bulk scraping, and ordinary hand-paced work never touches them.

Where to keep the backup

A backup that lives in one place is a backup you will lose eventually. Two copies on two kinds of storage is the minimum that survives a dropped laptop or a dead drive. A folder on your computer plus the same folder synced to a cloud drive is enough for most people; an external drive updated once a quarter is a fine third copy.

Structure the folder so it still makes sense in five years:

pinterest-backup-2026/
  own-uploads/
  references/
    kitchen/
    garden/
  pins.txt
  README.txt

The README.txt needs only a few lines: when the backup was made, which boards it came from, and a reminder that the references folder holds other people's work. Naming files consistently is the difference between a usable archive and a pile, and organizing downloaded pins has a naming scheme and folder rules that scale well past a single backup.

Check the files after saving. Open a couple of videos to confirm they play and glance at image dimensions to confirm you have originals rather than previews. Finding a broken file in a year, when the account is long gone, is the one failure this whole exercise is meant to prevent.

What you may and may not do with the archive afterwards

The own-uploads folder is yours without conditions. Post it, print it, sell prints, do what you like.

The references folder is a private collection of other people's work, and leaving Pinterest does not change that. Keeping the files for personal reference is the everyday case the plain-English legality guide walks through, and it is a calm situation. Reposting those files to a new platform, using them in a client presentation as if they were yours, or selling them is a different act entirely, and the creator's rights follow the file wherever it goes. If you ever want to share one, the notes file gives you the creator's name to ask and to credit, which is exactly why you recorded it.

This is also why the notes file deserves the same care as the media. A folder of unnamed images with no sources is a folder you can never responsibly do anything with beyond looking at it.

A short pre-deletion checklist

Sort boards into keep, skim and let go.
Save your own uploads into own-uploads, named and dated.
Handle secret boards by making them public briefly or using Pinterest's own save option.
Save irreplaceable references and log each one in pins.txt with creator and URL.
Spot-check that videos play and images are full size.
Copy the folder to a second location.
Deactivate first if you are unsure; delete only when the backup is verified.

None of this takes more than an evening for a normal account, and it means the decision to leave is only about the platform, not about losing years of things you meant to keep.