Your board finished importing, you checked it against Pinterest, and the numbers do not match. Here is what that means and what you can do about it.
What the notice on your board means
When a board imports with fewer pins than Pinterest listed, we say so at the top of the board rather than let you find it by counting:
"Pinterest lists 6,255 pins, but only 5,833 could be saved. The other 422 could not be retrieved. They may have been deleted or made private by the board or pin owner, or Pinterest may not be serving them in the board list."
The notice, shown at the top of the boardWhy the two numbers don't match
Pinterest's number is a count it keeps for the board. It is not a promise of what Pinterest will send when a tool asks for the pins themselves. Those are two different figures, and the second one is often smaller.
A pin can stay in the count after it stops being served. Whoever pinned it may have deleted it, made their board private, or closed their account. We save what Pinterest actually sends, and nothing we can do makes it send more.
What we fixed
Not all of the difference was Pinterest. Until recently, a large section that hit a network stumble partway through would stop there: we kept what had arrived and moved on instead of asking again. Boards with several big sections lost the most this way.
Sections are now retried automatically when a fetch ends early, so an import that trips over a bad moment picks itself back up. Anything imported since is more complete.
How to import one section again
If a single section looks short next to Pinterest, you can import that section on its own. It counts as its own thing, so it will not be turned away for belonging to a board you already have.
Copy the section's own link
Open the section on Pinterest and copy the link from the address bar. It ends with the section name, not just the board name.
Paste it on your dashboard
We recognise it as a section and show you its pin count before anything is saved, so you can check it looks right first.
Save it
It appears in Recent while it imports, then lands as its own collection beside the board rather than inside it. Expect some overlap with the copy already there.
For a private board, do this from the browser extension instead. The dashboard route needs a board Pinterest will show to a signed-out visitor, which is covered in why a board link won't import.
Still not adding up? Email us with the board link and we will look at what happened to that specific import.