Quick answer: A working designer with 50+ Pinterest boards used PinSuite to download every board as organized ZIP files, export CSV credit sheets for client attribution, generate PDF moodboards for presentations, and extract color palettes for brand work. Total time: about 2 hours for 50 boards. This is the workflow.
If you use Pinterest professionally, this scenario will sound familiar. You have boards for every client project, every personal research topic, and every style direction you've explored over the years. Some boards have 30 pins. Others have 500. They're organized by sections you set up carefully: "Typography", "Color Reference", "Layout Ideas", "Competitors."
Then one day, you click into a board and half the pins are dead. The design blog that posted them shut down. The Dribbble shot was removed. The Behance project was taken private. Your carefully curated reference library has holes in it, and there's no way to get those images back.
This is the story of backing up all 50 boards before that happens.
The Starting Point: 50 Boards, 8,000+ Pins
The boards broke down roughly like this:
- 12 active client project boards with sections for typography, color, layout, competitor screenshots, and mood direction. Average 150-300 pins each.
- 8 personal style reference boards covering minimalist design, editorial layouts, packaging, and retro aesthetics. Some over 500 pins.
- 15 niche inspiration boards for specific topics: kitchen renovation, architecture, fashion photography, tattoo art, travel destinations.
- 10 technique reference boards with UI patterns, icon design, motion graphics, and color palette collections.
- 5 archived project boards from past clients that needed to be preserved for portfolio and reference.
Total: roughly 8,000 pins across 50 boards. A mix of images, videos, and a handful of GIFs. Some boards hadn't been touched in two years. Others were updated weekly.
Step 1: Download Every Board
The basic operation is simple. Go to PinSuite, paste a board URL, and download. Each board saves as a ZIP file where sections become named folders.
For 50 boards, the workflow was:
- Open the Pinterest profile page
- Copy each board URL one at a time
- Paste into PinSuite and start the save
- Move to the next board while the previous one processes
PinSuite processes boards in the background, so you don't wait for each one to finish before starting the next. A 200-pin board typically takes 30-60 seconds. The larger boards (500+ pins) took a few minutes each.
Total time for all 50 boards: about 90 minutes of active work (copying URLs), with processing happening in parallel.
Step 2: Export CSV Credit Sheets
This was the step that justified the entire process. For client work, you need to know where every reference image came from. Who designed it. What site it was on. Whether it's a Dribbble shot or a live website.
PinSuite's CSV export includes:
- Pin title and full description text
- Original source URL (the website the pin links to)
- Image dimensions
- Media type (image, video, GIF)
- Board name and section name
For each client project board, the CSV became a credit sheet. Open it in Google Sheets or Excel, filter by section, and you have a record of every reference image with its source. When the client asks "where did that kitchen layout come from?" you can answer with the URL, not "I think it was on some design blog."
This matters for two reasons. First, professional attribution. If you're presenting reference images to a client, you should be able to credit the original designer or photographer. Second, legal protection. If a client uses a reference image in their own materials, having the source URL on record shows due diligence.
Step 3: Generate PDF Moodboards
Some boards were meant to become client presentations. Not ZIP files of loose images, but visual moodboards with context.
PinSuite's PDF export lays out the board as a visual gallery: pin images with their titles, descriptions, and source URLs in a printable format. For 12 active client projects, this meant 12 PDF moodboards generated automatically from boards that already existed on Pinterest.
The alternative workflow (before PinSuite) was:
- Screenshot each pin from Pinterest (losing resolution)
- Paste into Figma or InDesign
- Manually add titles and source credits
- Export as PDF
That process takes 30-60 minutes per board. With PinSuite, it takes about 30 seconds: select the board, choose PDF format, export. The output isn't as custom-designed as a hand-built Figma moodboard, but for initial client direction presentations, it's more than sufficient.
Step 4: Extract Color Palettes
Three of the client projects involved brand identity work. For each, there was a Pinterest board of visual direction: color photography, product shots, and interior design that captured the mood the brand should evoke.
PinSuite's color palette extraction analyzes the images in a board and produces hex codes, color names, and harmony sets. Instead of manually eyedropping colors from individual pins (which gives inconsistent results depending on compression), the palette tool processes the entire board and finds the dominant color themes.
For brand work, this turned a vague "the brand should feel like this Pinterest board" conversation into a concrete set of hex codes that went directly into the brand guidelines. The palette became the starting point for the color system, not an afterthought.
Step 5: Share Select Boards with Clients
Not every client uses Pinterest. Some don't have accounts. Others find the interface overwhelming. But they all need to see the reference material that's guiding their project.
PinSuite's public sharing feature generates a link for any collection. The client opens it in a browser and sees a clean visual gallery. No Pinterest account required. No ads. No algorithm suggestions. Just the curated reference images organized by section.
For the 12 active client projects, sharing the board as a PinSuite gallery link replaced the old workflow of "here's a Pinterest board link, you'll need to create an account to see it." Clients responded better because the gallery is focused: it shows only what was curated, nothing else.
What the Backup Actually Looks Like
After processing all 50 boards, the result was:
- 50 ZIP files with images organized by board section (total ~12 GB)
- 50 CSV files with metadata for every pin (source URLs, descriptions, dimensions)
- 12 PDF moodboards for active client projects
- 3 color palettes with hex codes for brand identity work
- 12 shareable gallery links for client collaboration
Everything lives in the PinSuite library (browsable online) and on a local drive (downloaded as files). If Pinterest changes its algorithm, deletes a pin, or goes down for maintenance during a client presentation, the reference material still exists.
What Would Have Been Lost Without the Backup
A quick audit of the downloaded boards revealed the scope of the dead link problem. Across 8,000 pins:
- Pins linking to Dribbble shots that had been removed by the designer
- Blog post URLs that 404 because the design blog migrated to a new domain
- Behance project links that were taken private or deleted
- Etsy product listings that expired when the seller closed shop
- Agency portfolio pages that were rebuilt without redirects
In every case, the pin image still existed on Pinterest, but the source context was gone. The CSV export preserved whatever was in the description at download time. Without the backup, that context would have been lost the moment the pin was re-crawled and the dead link detected.
The Ongoing Workflow
The initial backup took about 2 hours. The ongoing maintenance is simpler:
- When starting a new client project, create the Pinterest board as usual. When the board reaches a useful size, save it to PinSuite.
- Before a client presentation, re-download the board to capture any recent additions.
- When a project wraps, do a final download and CSV export. Archive the ZIP and CSV alongside the project files.
- For personal reference boards, re-download quarterly to capture new pins and preserve source URLs before they die.
The cost is $6.99/month for Pro (or $49/year, or $99 lifetime). For context, that's less than one stock photo from most paid libraries. The value isn't the download itself. It's having organized, attributed, shareable reference material that doesn't depend on Pinterest staying exactly the way it is today.
Who This Workflow Works For
This case study is from a designer's perspective, but the same workflow applies to:
- Interior designers who maintain architecture and kitchen design boards for renovation projects
- Marketing teams who collect competitor visual references and brand inspiration
- Photographers who build pose and lighting boards for on-location reference
- Event planners who share party theme boards with vendors (baker, florist, decorator)
- Teachers and educators who download classroom resource boards for offline use
- Anyone with more than 10 boards who would lose significant curation time if those boards disappeared
Your boards are worth backing up.
Download your boards, export credit sheets, generate moodboards, extract palettes. $6.99/mo, cancel anytime.
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