How to schedule Pinterest Pins

• Media. Pinterest has no text-only Pin. A Pin with no image or video is refused, and Hookpost stops it before scheduling with "Requires at least one media".
• A board. Every Pin is saved to a board, and the board is the one required setting. Create the boards you plan to use in Pinterest first; the scheduler lists the boards of the connected account.
• A description, up to 500 characters. This is the text Pinterest uses to understand what the Pin is about.
• Optionally, a title of up to 100 characters and a destination link. The link must be a full URL starting with https://.

Pinterest's feed is a grid of tall images, so a vertical 2:3 image, such as 1000x1500, takes up the most room and reads best on a phone. Square images work. Wide landscape images look small in the grid.

Put a few words of text on the image itself if the Pin is a how-to or a list: people scroll the grid by looking, not reading descriptions. Keep the text large enough to read on a phone, and away from the bottom corners where Pinterest places its own buttons.

• Up to five images can go into one Pin, shown as a multi-image Pin. Hookpost refuses more with "You can only have up to 5 media items".
• All images in a multi-image Pin must have the same width and height. Mixed sizes are refused with "Requires all images to have the same width and height". Export them from one template.

A video Pin is one video plus a cover image. The cover is what shows in the grid before the video plays, so pick a frame that explains the Pin without sound. In Hookpost you either set a cover on the video itself or attach a cover image as the second item; with neither, the post is stopped with "If posting a video, set a cover on it (Preview -> Create Thumbnail) or attach a cover image as second media". A video Pin cannot also carry extra images: "If posting a video you can only have two media items".

Export the video vertically if you can, for the same reason as images. The video is uploaded to Pinterest first and processed there, and the Pin is created once processing finishes, so a video Pin can take a few minutes longer to appear than an image Pin.

For image Pins, the scheduler does not send the file itself. It sends Pinterest a link to the image, and Pinterest's servers download it from there. Two things follow from that. First, the image must be on a public address that anyone can open without signing in; a file on a private drive or behind a login fails. Second, if the image host is slow or down at the moment of publishing, the Pin fails with "Pinterest was unable to reach the URL provided. Please check the link and try again." Hookpost uploads your media to its own public media address for exactly this reason, and retries this error automatically.

• Write the description for search. Say plainly what the Pin shows and who it is for, in the words someone would type into Pinterest's search box.
• Do not paste the same description on every Pin. Each Pin should describe its own image.
• Use the title for the short version of the same idea, under 100 characters.
• Point the link at the exact page the Pin is about, not your homepage. Someone who taps a recipe Pin wants that recipe.
• Check the link opens before you schedule. A Pin that leads to an error page loses the visitor it earned.

• Prepare the images in one sitting from one template, so sizes match and the style is consistent.
• Spread them out: a few Pins a day across the week rather than twenty at once.
• Use more than one board when the content fits more than one, but save each Pin to the board it truly belongs to.
• Reuse a good page with a new image later, rather than pinning the identical image again.

Pinterest controls which apps may publish. A new app starts with Trial access, which can read boards but cannot create Pins on a live account, and has to be approved for Standard access before it can publish. If you build your own tool and see "Apps with Trial access may not create Pins", that is the reason; no code change fixes it. Hookpost's app has Standard access.

Creating a Pin also needs permission to write to boards, not just to Pins, because Pinterest counts adding a Pin as a change to the board it lands on. A connection made before a tool asked for that permission keeps failing until it is renewed, and refreshing the old connection does not widen it. Hookpost reports this as "This Pinterest connection is missing the permissions needed to publish. Disconnect it and connect again to re-authorise." Disconnect the account and connect it again.

• "The specified board was not found. Please check the board ID." The board was deleted or renamed into a secret board you no longer own. Pick the board again.
• "When uploading a video, you must add also an image to be used as a cover image." Add a cover, as described above.
• "You can upload a maximum of 5 images per post on Pinterest." Split the images over two Pins.

Hookpost's Pinterest integration: its validation rules (media required, board required, up to five same-size images, one video with a cover, 100-character title, 500-character description) and the error messages it maps Pinterest's responses to, read from its code on 13 November 2026, and the Pins we published while building it, including the Trial-access and board-permission failures described above. Hookpost is a product of the same team as HookStep.

• Pinterest API v5 documentation, read 13 November 2026.

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