How to Schedule Pinterest Pins: Review, Edit and Approve

Watch the walkthrough

Six minutes on the calendar, including the pin editor and filling empty slots. The written version below covers the same ground with a bit more explanation.

Nothing publishes without you

The calendar is where every pin PinFlow generates waits for a decision. Nothing reaches Pinterest until you approve it, so you always see a pin before anyone else does.

The PinFlow calendar with pins grouped by day, awaiting approval

The four tabs

Needs Approval is where newly generated pins land. This is your review queue and the tab you will spend nearly all your time on.

Scheduled holds pins you have approved. They are waiting on their slot and will publish on their own. Pins that have already gone out are marked as published and are no longer editable, since they now exist on Pinterest.

All is everything, across every state.

Rejected is what you skipped. Rejecting is not deleting, so if you change your mind, the pin is still here.

Approve a day at a time

Pins are grouped by the day they are due to post, with a count next to each date, for example "September 7, 6 pins".

Each day's header has an approve button and a reject button that act on the whole day. This is the fast path, and it is how the queue is meant to be worked: if a day's six pins all look fine, approve the day and move on. Only open the individual ones that look off.

A day header showing the date and pin count, with the approve and reject buttons for the whole day

You can also approve or reject pins one at a time from their own row, and there is a control to approve everything at once if you are feeling brave.

Editing a pin before it goes out

Hover a pin and click the pencil to open the editor. Everything about that pin can be changed here.

Image Text is the headline drawn on the pin image itself. Type a longer line and the font size adjusts to fit, so you do not have to size text by hand.

Pinterest Title and Description are what appear under the pin on Pinterest. Both are written for you from the product, and both are worth a glance because they are what Pinterest reads when deciding who to show the pin to.

Alt Text describes the image for Pinterest and for screen readers.

Outbound URL is the page that opens when someone clicks the pin. It points at the product on your store and rarely needs changing.

The pin editor showing Image Text, Pinterest Title, Description, Alt Text, Outbound URL and Board to Pin

Boards are chosen for you

Each pin shows the board it will post to, picked automatically based on how well the product matches the boards you have.

That matching only works if there is something to match against. With two or three boards, most pins end up in the same place regardless of what they are.

Image fit and position

Image fit is Cover or Contain.

Choose Cover. It stretches the photo to fill the pin, so there is no empty space. Contain fits the whole photo in and leaves blank bands, which looks unfinished in a feed.

Image position decides which part of the photo survives the crop, from top left through to bottom right, and the preview updates as you change it. The default of centre works for most product photography. Change it when the subject of the photo is not in the middle of the frame.

Palettes, fonts and templates

The pin opens with the palette, font and template it was generated with, taken from your Pin Studio defaults, and each can be swapped for this pin alone.

Selected Palettes and the three font slots in the pin editor

The template is the one worth checking. Templates lay their design over the product photo in different places, so on some products a template will sit right over the thing you are selling. If a pin looks wrong, try two or three other templates and pick the one that leaves the product visible.

Greyed-out multi-image templates with a tooltip explaining the product has only one image

Moving a pin to another slot

At the bottom of the editor is a date picker. Choose a date, then one of the time slots on it.

Dates that are already full show as disabled, and so do dates in the past. If everything looks greyed out, page forward until you reach dates with room.

Saving keeps your edits, approves the pin, and moves it to Scheduled at the slot you chose.

Filling empty slots

Reject a few pins and you leave holes in the schedule: slots that were going to be filled and now are not.

When PinFlow spots them, a banner appears telling you how many empty slots you have and between which dates. Fill Empty Slots generates exactly enough new pins to cover them, and tells you which dates they landed on.

The empty slots banner with the Fill Empty Slots button

This is the tidy way to reject freely. Skip anything you do not like, then fill the gaps in one click rather than losing posting days.

If the queue is thin further out rather than patchy, that is a job for the bulk generator instead: see Settings, on the Status tab, which builds a fresh batch out to a date you pick.

Related

• Pin Studio: Design Your Pinterest Pins for changing the templates and colours that every pin is generated with.
• Setting Your Pinterest Posting Schedule for how many pins a day and at what times.
• How to Post Fresh Pins Consistently With Only 50 Shopify Products for keeping the queue full from a small catalog.