Pinterest is worth your time if your clients plan before they book: couples planning a wedding, parents planning family or newborn sessions, small brands planning a rebrand. They type a search, save ideas to a board, and click through to the page behind the pin that answers their question. That last click is the only part that matters to you, and it almost never goes to a homepage.
So the working model is simple. Make vertical 2:3 pins from your own images, link each one to a specific useful page on your site, file them on boards named the way clients search, and give it months rather than weeks. Pins keep surfacing in search long after an Instagram post has vanished from the feed.
Is Pinterest worth it for photographers?
It is for genres where the client is planning something: weddings, elopements, engagements, family, maternity, newborn, branding sessions, and anything with an outfit or a venue decision attached. It is much weaker for headshots, events and real estate, where the buyer has a deadline and goes straight to Google.
The audience is also different from Instagram. On Instagram the people engaging with your work are often other photographers. On Pinterest they are mostly planners looking for ideas, which is why a pin titled "What to wear for autumn family photos" outperforms one titled with your business name. If you already run an Instagram account, Pinterest is not a second copy of it; growing on Instagram is a different job with a different audience.
How do you set up a Pinterest business account?
Use a free business account, not a personal one, because only business accounts get analytics and the ability to claim a website.
- Create or convert the account and use your business name with your genre and area in the profile name: "Ana Ruiz | Lisbon Wedding Photographer".
- Claim your website: profile icon, Settings, then Claimed accounts (labelled Link to Pinterest on some versions), click Claim next to Websites and add the HTML tag Pinterest gives you to your site's head. A DNS TXT record also works.
- Make sure your blog pages carry proper Open Graph titles and descriptions, so pins from them pick up the article title automatically.
Claiming matters because it attributes every pin of your pages to you, even those saved by other people, and lets you see in analytics which of your pages people pin most.
Which boards should a photographer have?
Name boards after searches, not after yourself. "Our favourite moments" gets no search traffic. "Rustic barn wedding ideas", "What to wear for family photos" and "Sintra elopement locations" do. Keep names under about 50 characters and write a one or two sentence description using the same words.
Eight to fifteen boards is enough to start. A sensible split for a wedding photographer:
- One board per venue type or venue you shoot often.
- One board per planning question: getting ready, family photo lists, timelines, what to wear for engagement photos.
- One board per season in your area.
Filling some boards with other people's pins is fine and makes them more useful to the client. Keep your own pins near the top by pinning to each board regularly.
What pin formats work best?
- Standard image pins at 1000 x 1500 pixels, a 2:3 ratio. Anything taller than about 1:2.1 gets cropped in the feed, and landscape images shrink to a strip nobody stops for. Crop vertically from your originals in Lightroom rather than letterboxing a landscape frame.
- Video pins at 2:3 or 9:16, a few seconds to a few minutes long. A ten second behind the scenes clip or a slow pan across a detail table works well.
- Carousel pins of two to five images at the same ratio, useful for a sequence such as one couple from portraits to first dance.
A short text overlay on some pins ("Rainy day wedding photos: 9 ideas") gives the image a reason to be clicked. Keep it on a plain area of the frame and leave most pins as clean photographs.
Titles can run to 100 characters, but the feed shows only the start of one, so put the search phrase first. Write the description as one or two plain sentences with the location and the genre in them, not a block of hashtags.
Where should each pin link to?
This is where most photographers lose the traffic. A pin linking to your homepage asks a planner to find the relevant page themselves, and they will not. Link every pin to the page that matches it:
- A venue pin links to your post about shooting at that venue.
- A what to wear pin links to your what to wear guide.
- A family photo list pin links to the list.
- A portfolio image links to the matching gallery page or session story.
That means Pinterest only works as well as the pages behind it. If your site has nothing but a portfolio grid and a contact form, write five useful posts first. Photography blog ideas lists the post types that earn clicks, and they double as search pages on Google, which SEO basics for photographers covers.
Make several pins for each page using different images and titles. Pinterest favours fresh images, so five new pins pointing at one strong post usually beat one pin repinned five times.
How often should you pin?
Consistency counts more than volume. Five to ten new pins a week is a realistic pace for a working photographer, and the native scheduler lets you plan them: choose Publish at a later date when creating a pin. It schedules up to 30 days ahead, with a cap on how many pins can wait in the queue (10 at the time of writing), so top it up as pins go live.
Batch the work. After each session, export six to ten vertical crops into a Pinterest folder alongside the full gallery, then schedule them over the next fortnight. Pin seasonal content early: people start planning Christmas mini sessions and autumn family photos weeks before the date, and the Pinterest Trends tool (trends.pinterest.com) shows when searches for a topic in your country start to climb.
How do you know if Pinterest is working?
Look at outbound clicks, not saves or impressions. In Pinterest Analytics, filter to your claimed site and sort pins by outbound clicks; those are the visits. In your own site analytics, check Pinterest as a referrer and which pages it lands on.
Give it six months before judging. Pins often take weeks to start appearing in search and then keep sending visits for months, so the first quarter looks quiet. If after six months your top pins all point at one or two posts, write more pages like those and stop pinning the ones that send nothing.
Pick the three most useful pages you already have, make five 1000 x 1500 pins for each with different images and titles, and schedule the first ten across the next two weeks. Make sure each page has a clear next step for the visitor, such as a contact form or a booking link, so a click from a planner can become an enquiry.
