grabpins

Notes

Every one of these came out of building the lookup tool on this site, which meant reading a lot of pin pages and measuring what came back. They are written down here because the answers were not obvious, were not documented anywhere, and kept explaining behaviour that otherwise looks like a bug.

What the notes are about

Three things keep coming up, and each has a note of its own.

A pin is not one file. It is a small pile of them. A twenty-second video pin can hold six separate copies of the same clip plus a streaming playlist, and an image pin holds five or six widths of the same photo. Almost every confusing thing about saving from Pinterest follows from that.

The copies are not interchangeable. The small ones are HEVC and the large one is H.264, which sounds like trivia until a file opens with sound over a black rectangle. That difference decides whether a download is useful or useless, and it depends entirely on the device you are opening it on.

A pin is a pointer, and pointers break. The poster deletes it, the blog it links to gets sold, or the video that was the recipe simply goes away. Anything you actually rely on is safer as a file you hold.

How the numbers here were arrived at

Every measurement quoted — the 1.39 MB copy against the 8.65 MB one, the "original" image that turns out to be smaller than the JPEG beside it — came from fetching real pins and checking what actually arrived. Nothing here is repeated from another article, and where something is unverified it says so.

If you only want the file, the Pinterest downloader is on every page. These notes are for when you want to know why it behaves the way it does.