Help! My flickr photos are no longer pinterest friendly. *UPDATED*

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UPDATED May 6, 2012: Flickr has recently changed it’s policies and added the no-pin meta tag to all private flickr photos. This made every photo on my blog unpinnable because most of my flickr photos were set to private. Here is the info I’ve gathered on making my photos pinterest friendly again.

If your flickr blog images are greyed out and not able to be pinned, but you want them to be pinned, you should be able to follow these steps to get your flickr settings right.

1. Make your flickr images public. You have to give the green light for your photos to be viewed by the world on flickr in order for them to be viewed by pinterest.

NOTE: If you do NOT want your images to be pinned but still want them to show up on your blog, you do have the option to make your images private and share them on your blog. This is actually an advantage if you don’t want pictures of your kids or yourself flying haphazardly all over pinterest. Pick and choose which photos you want pinned in your blog posts and fix your public or private settings accordingly.

WARNING! PROCEED WITH CAUTION: If you change your settings from public to private on flickr, you will have to go back and re-enter your blog HTML code for every image that has been changed because they will no longer show up at all on your blog. You will see only a big white box where your photo used to be that says “Photo not available.” And you might cry. The permalink URL gets changed when you go from public to private and it breaks the image link so it’s no longer viewable at ALL on your blog posts. This can equal hours of work and headache if you do willy-nilly batch edits of photos. Trust me on this. PITA. Proceed with caution. You should be able to change your settings from private to public without an issue. Hopefully.

2. Click here to change your API settings Make sure all boxes are unchecked.

Here is the reason from a Flickr admin: “Pinterest uses the API to get information about the photo you’re trying to pin. If you opt out of API searches, they aren’t able to get that information and you can’t pin the photo.”

3. Click here to allow others to share your stuff on pinterest. Make sure the button that says “Yes please, that would be lovely.” is checked.

4. Click here to set your license to Creative Commons. I changed my settings from None (All rights reserved) to Attribution Creative Commons.

I’m going to be honest and say I have no idea what a Creative Commons License really means and I don’t have the time to read all those different license options to find out what they mean either. But this setting has worked for me.

If you follow those steps, your photos should be viewable on your blog and pinnable by pinterest.

I hope! 🙂

If not, I’m sorry. And I take no responsibility if your images are still not pinnable after you follow those steps because I have nothing to do with flickr and their changes/ policies. Just trying to help out others who might encounter this issue.

If you’re experiencing troubles with flickr images not pinning anymore, come weigh in on this thread at the flickr help forum.

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Hey guys! Hope everyone had a nice holiday weekend.

I’ve got a pretty big issue over here on my blog that I’m trying to figure out.

In the past few days I’ve discovered that my blog photos are no longer pinnable! Yikes! I’ve noticed a huge drop in traffic from pinterest lately which had me wondering what was going on because typically my traffic is pretty consistent from the site. Then yesterday morning I saw this comment come across my pins from my blog that explained why the traffic has dried up.

Originally this pinner Nell had posted in the comment section that I wasn’t allowing my photos to be pinned from my blog. This was news to me! I had no idea what she was talking about, until I tried to pin something from my blog and saw that all of my photos are greyed out and not pinnable any more. When I hit “Pin It” on my blog, it looks like this:

Every single image posted from flickr is gray and says “Sorry, cannot pin this image”. My jaw nearly hit the floor. I left a comment thanking Nell saying that I didn’t know I had blocked pinning. I have been trying to figure out a solution ever since. I’m still coming up empty handed.

You guys know that I love Pinterest. Pinterest has literally given my blog a heartbeat. Pinterest has driven over 133,000 referrals to my blog since August of 2011. The next highest traffic source is Google at around 17,000 referrals. This is a big, big deal to lose that kind of traffic, especially when I never made any changes on my end to begin with! I want all my blog images to be pinnable. Otherwise I wouldn’t post them on the internet at all.

I have researched a little and see that flickr is automatically adding the new no-pin code to all pictures on their site unless an account has the share feature enabled and their photos are made public. A flickr user suggested this and flickr ran with it and made the changes automatically. If you’ve been reading about the pinterest copyright violation / terms of service debate, this is the reason for the change. A lot of people don’t want their pictures to be pinned and shared without their permission so they have caused an uproar about copyright violations. Pinterest listened and made changes to their terms of service. Flickr then followed suit and added the no-pin code to all images to protect the people who don’t want their images pinned. It looks like it’s taken them a while to get around to everyone’s photos since this change happened in February and I’m just getting affected by it in April. Understandable, since there are millions of flickr users. I understand all of this. I don’t necessarily agree with the no-pinners stance, but I understand why it is happening and I was ok with making my photos public to get around the issue.

So here is the solution to my problem, or so I thought.

For six years now I’ve been writing my blog entries using the static flickr links that are not public on flickr but are viewable when the only the code is shared. Here is my reason for that: I don’t want all my images public on flickr, especially ones of my son and family, so by default, because I am absentminded and will forget otherwise, I’ve set all my images to upload to private; viewable to friends and family only. Then, I individually link the source code of the images that I want to show on my blog using the static flickr HTML code. This system has worked well for me for many years. I have really loved flickr up to this point. I don’t want to upload all my images to Blogger because if/when I decide to move my blog to wordpress or another blogging platform I don’t want to lose all my past content. Having them on flickr made them accessible from anywhere.

But not anymore.

I was thinking that because I have set my blog images up this way, I have six years worth of blog photos to make public on flickr. And I was really disappointed and bummed by this thought, but it was somewhat do-able.

Then last night I tried testing some of my images to make sure that they would be pinnable if I just simply changed my flickr photo albums to public. I enabled my sharing feature, and started changing whole albums over to public. I started with the images from my recent home office reveal. And guess what? After changing my settings to enable the share feature and making the pictures public on flickr they are STILL not pinnable for me. So now it looks like I might have six years worth of blog images to re-upload and recode in order to be pinnable.

Ummm…holy crap. Are you kidding me?

Then today after I asked for some help from friends I’ve discovered that my friend Allison is able to pin my images – both public AND private ones- from her work computer, but not from her home computer. My friend Mandy is not able to pin any of my images. I am not able to pin any either. We are all using Firefox.

This makes no sense. I am truly hoping this is a simple fix but I have a dreaded feeling in the pit of my stomach that it is not going to be simple. I’m wondering if I make images public from here forward if you can pin them. Possibly it’s only the ones I’ve changed to public retroactively that aren’t working right?

I’m going to conduct a test. Can you please click the “Pin It” button and see if they are greyed out or not? I know that the pictures in the beginning of this post will be pinnable because they were uploaded directly to Blogger. But like I’ve already said, this is not the ideal way for me to share pics on my blog.

So here are my test images. Let’s see how pinnable they are. You can see how much larger they are than the “large” blogger image at the top. That’s another reason I liked using flickr for my blog photos.

If any of you are seeing any other bloggers discussing this with solutions to this issue, please, PLEASE let me know. I realize that there are many options for photo sharing sites out there, and also the option to self-host my blog and it’s content. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there. For now I’m just trying to do some damage control and figure out how to get my EXISTING images back up and pinning correctly.
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UPDATE:

I got an answer from Ross at Flickr (Thanks Ross!):

“We think the problem is caused by opting-out of API searches. Click here to change your API settings (make sure all boxes are unchecked) www.flickr.com/account/prefs/optout/

Pinterest uses the API to get information about the photo you’re trying to pin. If you opt out of API searches, they aren’t able to get that information and you can’t pin the photo.

We’re double checking this now, but in the short-term, going to the link above and opting back in will fix the problem.”

If you’re experiencing troubles with flickr images not pinning anymore, come weigh in on this thread at the flickr help forum.

So… now to just go back and make all my boards public one by one. 🙁

I’m linking up at

Stories of A to Z Tutorials and Tips

Photography party at A Nest For All Seasons