Expert's Rating
Pros
- Schedule your pins on an exact day and time
- Bookmarklet supplied to batch choose images
- Stats also supplied to track popularity of pins
Cons
- Bookmarklet ignores pre-set timezone and schedules, forcing you to re-do everything
- No way to revoke website access to Pinterest account
Our Verdict
Pingraphy is an essential service for Pinterest users who need to post at all hours of the day.
Social media is popular, but needs to be taken in small doses. Nobody wants to be bombarded with lots and lots of status updates and photos all at the same time. When posting your items to a social media site, it is good practice to spread everything out over a 24-hour period. Services such as TweetDeck help us do this for Twitter, but Pinterest is a different matter. But unless you are the world’s biggest insomniac, you are going to need a service such as Pingraphy to help you out.
Pingraphy is a Web service that enables you to log into your Pinterest account and schedule images to automatically be posted on a set schedule in the future. There is even a bookmarklet you can use which, when clicked, will pull all of the images from a webpage and then send them to Pingraphy for you.
But first, you need to log into Pingraphy using your Pinterest credentials. Unfortunately this involves giving Pingraphy your password. As of this writing, there is no way to sign in with a permissions system which can be revoked later, similar to Google Accounts or Facebook. So you have to decide if you are comfortable giving out your Pinterest password.
This is where one of the drawbacks of Pingraphy becomes readily apparent. There is no function to revoke the website’s access to your Pingraphy account, which means the only way to block Pingraphy is to change your Pinterest password.
Assuming you are OK with revealing your password and you have logged in, you will then be invited to drag the bookmarklet up to your browser toolbar. When clicked on a webpage, the bookmarklet will pull all of the images into a clickable list and you can choose which ones you want to be scheduled to get pinned in your Pinterest account.
Also, as part of the setup, you are provided with a calendar and sliders so you can specify the exact date and time the first pin should go out. You then specify your timezone and the interval (in minutes) between each pin going out. So theoretically you could schedule pins days, weeks, even months ahead if you want to. Perfect if you are going on holiday or if there will be an event which will necessitate you being away from the computer for extended periods.
The dashboard gives you a nice overview of all the scheduled pins, so you can see at a glance what is due to go out, and what has gone out recently. From here, you can also click on “track”, which allows you to see which of your pins were the most popular, how many times they were repinned and liked, and how many comments were received. These numbers are displayed in table format for easy viewing.
Using these numbers, you can see right away which kinds of images generally do well and which ones don’t, enabling you to fine-tune your social media policy, which is important if you rely on social media to do your job more efficiently.
Apart from the inability to revoke the website’s access to your Pinterest account and a bug in the bookmarklet which overrides the timezone settings (the latter of which is a very minor thing), Pingraphy is definitely a service you should consider if you are looking for this kind of thing, given that it seems to be the only service right now which schedules Pinterest updates in advance.
Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor’s site, where you can use the latest version of this Web-based software.