Using Pinterist for Planning your Travel Photography Trips

Pinterest is a terrific tool for travel photography inspiration allowing the photographer to create a bucket list of places to visit.  Pinterest is also a great tool for travel photography planning as well.

On Pinterest, you can create boards specific to your travel destination that allow you to easily organize and find the information for your photography trip.  The photos that you pin to your travel destination board also link back to the original source making it easy to retrieve additional information.  You can also use the comments field to add additional information to the pin.

I also like to keep an inspiration board with potential future destinations that I’d like to eventually photograph.  I can then create destination specific boards once I decide to visit the location.

Photos and information can be pinned to your board by searching Pinterest or the web.

Searching Pinterest

When typing in the Pinterest search box, you will see a list of suggested terms.  You can select one of these suggested terms to help narrow down your search. The search results will show Pins, Boards, and Pinners who pinned the topic of your search.

After you click on a pin, you will also see more posts from the same board on the right side of the picture and also related posts at the bottom.  Related posts are a great way to find additional information and photos for a destination.

You also may want to follow boards or pinners that show up on your travel destination search.  On Pinterest, you will see pins on your home feed of boards and pinners that you follow.

Adding Pins from the Web

If you prefer to search the web using Google, Bing or another search engine for information on your travel photography destination, you can also pin information that you find to your board.

To add information that you find on the web to your Pinterest board

• Click on the “Add a Pin” box on the upper left hand corner of your board.
• Select Add a Pin from “The Web”
• Paste the url into the text box and click Next.
• Choose a photo for your Pin
• Select the board where you’d like the Pin
• Type a description if you’d like
• Click Pin It

To make pinning websites to Pinterest easier, you can add a Pin it button to your browser.  Just click on the Pin it button on your menu bar to pin the photos. The Pin it button is available for Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.

Pinterest Place Pins Feature

Pinterest also has a Place Pins feature that allows you to add a map to your board and display the locations of the photos that you’ve pinned on the board.  This is a nice way to see how far the destinations are from where you are staying and also to group destinations together to photograph.

However, the map does take up quite a bit of real estate on the board, leaving only two columns for your pins. You will need to scroll down the left side of the page quite a bit to see your pins.  I could not find away to adjust the sizing of the map.

The Place Pins feature is based on FourSquare’s location API so you are limited by locations that are known to FourSquare.  For example, the location for Baxter State Park on the Maine map was limited to the town of Millinocket that is about 19 miles away from the park.

Capturing Additional Information

I also like to do additional planning prior to leaving for a travel photography trip.  I like log information like the gps location of each destination, distance from where I am staying, sunrise/sunset times, and whether the location is a better to photograph at sunrise or sunset.

I don’t use Pinterest to store this information.  I like to use Evernote or Apple Pages for this additional information.

Written by Martin Belan

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