Pinning Cars From Pebble Beach

Pinterest is the latest online picture craze where users create boards where they “pin” their favorite pictures.  For those still unsure, this is a gentle how-to.  And no, this is not just for girls!  Even Bentley Motors has pinboards. There are wonderful pics of fabulous cars on Pinterest.  Try searching on any car or genre you like and you’ll likely uncover some awesome pictures.  I’ll be creating new pin boards after today’s The Quail: A Motorsports Gathering and Sunday’s Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.   In the coming weeks I’ll pin highlights of the automotive action from 2012 Pebble Beach Car Week.

For those still wondering what the hell Pinterest is, here is a quick primer:

Remember the antiquated thing called a bulletin board?  This is the digital version, though much better.  Car people are as fascinated with car pics almost as much as the real thing.  Hardly any of us has a big enough garage.  Flipping through magazines is frankly a bit time consuming and disjointed.  When you want to just sit back and enjoy pure visual eye candy, Pinterest is the place to go.What we covet we can now pin, to ogle and salivate over at will.  Here is one of my boards on the 2011 Pebble Beach Concours.

 Just what is a pin?  Any image added from a website with the Pin It button  you install on your toolbar or iPhone; or from the Pin It button on a blog (see it at the top of my page) or website; or an image you upload yourself.  All the car pics on my Pebble Beach boards were taken by me at the event.  On my Automotive Sculpture board the pins are from all over.

Before you do anything, sign up for Pinterest.  Don’t worry, it is nothing more than using an email address but it is a community so uploading a pic to your profile and saying a little about yourself helps others know a bit about you.  This is much less information than Facebook, but infinitely more fun – it is all about images.

Next install the Pin It button as mentioned because not every website has their own, and you are on your way to start pinning. Find an image on a website you’d like to save to your pinboard. The images available to pin will appear in a group, select the one you want to pin and place on your board.  A drop down box will show titles of boards you’ve already created or give you the option to create a board.  It helps to say a little something here.  Occasionally the information populates itself, but fee free to offer your comments or more details if you know them.Boards or pinboards are nothing more than a way to categorize your pins, just like naming a file folder.  Be as descriptive as you like.  Once you make a board you can open and edit it from your Pinterest page and further categorize it.Repin is not an act of copying, it is ratifying someone else’s taste or image by agreeing you like it as well.  Repining is the super easy way to share and a great way to start.  Find pins you like, repin or click through to their boards to follow for find more pins you love.  Comment or share at will.

Following and Followers: This is what you make of it.  It can be as juicy as Twitter or not.  This is a great way to find people with similar interests.  Recent pins from those you follow populate your main page.  This is the shortcut to see what they’ve been pinning without having to check everyone’s boards.

Pin what you like, what you love, what you covet, your dream car, dream garage – almost any picture online is pinnable.  Images in flash are not and some sites block pinning.  So move on or figure out your way around it with Print Screen (this is how I made all of the above images), save and upload it yourself.  Try to credit images or allow the path to remain open so others can find their way back to the original website your image came from if they’d like more information. 

Pinterest is about sharing.  Share your love of cars, food, fashion, ideas, houses, decorating – anything there is a picture of (clean) can be shared on Pinterest.  It is also useful as a virtual file folder of images and ideas.  For a more in-depth Guide to Pinterest click here.  I’ll be adding lots more cars once I return from Car Week.  Feel free to click around in my pinboards to get you started.  Happy pinning!