Using the Pinterest API

Last updated on April 22, 2013 in Development

Pinterst API documentation

Today, I hit 1000 Pinterest followers and decided to make a post about the service. 1000 followers is not much, but considering that I remain anonymous and haven’t done anything special to get followers, I think it’s noteworthy. I probably spend 30 minutes in the morning pinning images I like and that’s it. I wonder how long it will take me to hit 2000. Not following more people and not getting more involved in community boards is not helping, but I might change that soon. With all that being said, this post is about the Pinterest API.

According to Pinterest, they currently do not have a public API. However, they do have mobile apps and widgets and all that communication needs to happen over some API. If you setup some web debugging proxy in between your mobile Pinterest app and listen to the HTTP requests, it should give you a lot of insight. According to Pindown, an unofficial Pinterest board downloader, you could figure out your access_token and some interesting endpoints. I have joined a Pinterest API Facebook group which led me to a great public endpoint that lists your board’s pins in JSON: https://api.pinterest.com/v3/pidgets/boards/highquality/travel/pins/

If you know of any other v3 Pinterest API endpoints, please let me know in the comments. Version 2, which now seems to return a 404, had much more unofficial github scripts and even some well documented unofficial calls. What about version 3?

Web scraping is one way of getting the job done, and you can even leverage something like this web scraping pinterest API. But we all know that is not ideal so why don’t we have some real API documentation from Pinterest? I am sure they are working on a public API but can it really take that long to make it public? It seems they are already on version 3 so why not release it to developers? Your thoughts?

Update:

It looks like a couple days ago, Pinterest added a developers page to their website where you have access to Android and iOS SDK and documentation.

External:

Pinterest API stackoverflow thread
Pinterest API Coming Soon