Pinterest Pet Peeve

I've started frequenting Pinterest a lot.  A lot.  Like a really, whole lot, every day I scour through school resources.  So, naturally, I've developed a bit of a Pinterest pet peeve.  Broken links.  Or miscredited ones.  Such as Pinterest pins to a pinning site that pins you to another pin then you have to just take the stupid image and Google it to get to the actual project or product.  So I'm sending out my plea that pinners pin responsibly.  Lols.  Check the pins you're about to share and make sure they go to where you want them to go and not just a cool picture.  That DIY with 3 pics of a 5 step instruction doesn't tell your audience how to get from 2 to 3.  If the link doesn't enlighten them either then they just will move on.

How do we fix this?  First, find a pin to pin!

 Okay!  This one has 4 pics that do not show how you go from that middle one to that amazing looking bird bath (not feeder as it says) in the last step.  Let's click through...

40 Photos to weed through!  Okay 1, 2, 3, ....

Thirty.  :|  And when I got to that after much meme scrolling, it is a dead end.  It leads to a link of the jpg.  Which does not tell me what materials are used or who even made it.  Fortunately, tracking this down was easy.  The owner of the pic put their logo on each one.  Probably knowing that someone would make a pin image of all their best pics into a long pic with zero information.  So, I simply Googled "Me and My DIY" and found the site.

And at the top of their page is the link to the real deal!  What!?  Craziness.  Okay, it's never usually so easy.  Many sites you would need to actually search through their archives to find that one article, I got lucky.  And that link has about 3 times as many pictures with details explaining that they used DVDs instead of CDs and why, the sealer they used to make the birdbath waterproof, the before and after, the type of grout they used, and even tips on how they cut the discs into layers, etc.

Okay, from here, I copy the link URL and get back to my Pinterest tab and go ahead and pin the offending pin with the wrong info.

Choose your board and quick, "See it Now" before anyone repins it from you.  Then click on "Edit Pin".

Change the source, edit the description...  It is not a bird feeder, I ought to go correct that now, I forgot to!  ... And save your changes.  Now it is a fixed pin that everyone can happily re-pin away.

Now, if the photo isn't so easy to track down, say the description is gone and there is no watermark/logo/etc...  There is another way.  Google image search.  You right-click to copy the image URL (not the link URL), go to Google Images and "Search by Image".  Hopefully, this will lead you to the original creator.  This one might be more tricky as they took a bunch of their images and composited it into one, but Google can be clever sometimes.  When Google fails, try TinEye.

I guess this is a good reminder to us to clearly logo your pics if you want viewers to come back to your blog and not be stolen by sites seeking pageviews.  I don't want pageviews, I want people to actually come to my blog for the content there.  I want quality views!

I come across so many broken pins it can be kind of annoying.  I don't share broken things.  But if it is something I want to pass on, I need to search it to make sure that it is no longer broken when I pin it.  Sometimes, things cannot be found.  They are so old that the original article is gone, then you only have the idea.  Best to clear out the source and edit the pin to say that as well.

This probably won't be my only pet peeve there, but maybe sharing this will help others to fix the broken links they come across.  Pins that lead to blogs about the original creator aren't bad, but when they link to another blog about the other, then it feels tedious.  And I'll break the pin link and pin from the original source instead of repinning.