The guide board
How Pinterest downloads actually work.
Four guides on the parts that usually go unexplained. Each one takes a single question and follows it down to the mechanics, using figures from runs that were measured rather than adjectives.
- Guides
- 4
- Sections
- 16
- Questions answered
- 12
Four subjects, and the questions underneath them.
- Scale
Pinterest bulk downloader: what a whole board run counts
Why a board of forty thousand pins is a different problem from a board of forty, and why the number of files at the end is smaller than the number of pins at the start.
- A board is not a list, it is a stream
- What a run counts, and what it merges
- Where the ceiling actually is
- When a run stops early
- Resolution
Pinterest image downloader: why a saved image comes out small
Pinterest keeps the same photograph at several widths, and every size below the original is re-encoded. Which address holds which file, and what the largest one really is.
Read the guide3 min read, 4 sections - Media types
Pinterest video downloader: video, GIF and Idea pins behave differently
Four kinds of pin look identical in a grid and behave nothing alike on the way out, and one of them cannot be downloaded at all.
Read the guide3 min read, 4 sections - Access model
Pinterest downloader extension: what it reaches, and what it asks for
The access model stated plainly, with every permission the extension asks for and the reason it asks for it.
Read the guide3 min read, 4 sections
One board, two honest numbers.
A tour of one live board listed 41,367 pins and produced 18,744 files. The gap is not loss. The same photograph is pinned again and again, and a copy of an image already in the set is merged rather than saved twice. Pinterest returned 0 rate-limit responses during that run.
Read how the count works- Pins listed
- 41,367
- Files written
- 18,744
- Rate limits hit
- 0
Every question these guides answer
12 questions across the four guides. Filter by subject, then jump to the answer instead of to the top of the document that holds it.
Filter by subject
12 questions shown
- ScaleHow long does a large board take?
- ScaleWhy is my file count lower than the pin count?
- ScaleWhat happens to the files if I close the tab halfway?
- ResolutionCan BulkoPin make a small image bigger?
- ResolutionAre the files modified on the way out?
- ResolutionWhere do the files actually go?
- Media typesWhy did I get an image when I expected a video?
- Media typesDo multi-image pins download every slide?
- Media typesCan I download a video that I cannot see?
- Access modelDoes the extension see my Pinterest password?
- Access modelCan it reach a private board I am not a member of?
- Access modelDoes it keep running in the background?
The shortest version of all four.
BulkoPin is a browser extension for Chrome, Edge, Brave and Opera. It exports the Pinterest boards, profiles and search results you can already see, straight to a folder on your own machine.