RevapinBuilding a Designer Reference Library from Pinterest, Fast
You've spent months pinning references, and every one of them lives inside Pinterest. Pull them out. A browser extension can download a whole board into a folder on your computer, full resolution, in one pass. Then your references sit next to your project files instead of behind a login and an endless feed.
The problem with references that live in the app
Pinterest is a good place to collect, and a bad place to work from. When you're mid-project and need to compare three logo treatments, scrolling a board to find them again breaks your focus. The images are compressed previews, so you can't zoom in on the linework. And if a pin gets deleted by whoever posted it, your reference vanishes with it. A board is a mood, not an archive.
Downloading a whole board at once
The fast way is to grab the entire board in a single action rather than saving pins one by one. Open the board, select everything, and download. What lands on your drive is every pin at the largest resolution Pinterest has, packaged so you can drop the folder straight into your project directory. A board of two hundred references becomes a folder of two hundred files in the time it takes to make coffee.
You can also pick a subset if you only want part of the board. Tick the pins that matter, skip the rest.
Sections become folders
If you've organized a board into sections, that structure carries over. Each section comes down as its own subfolder, so a board split into Typography, Color, and Layout arrives on your computer already sorted the same way. You're not dumping four hundred loose images into one directory and re-sorting by hand. The organizing work you already did on Pinterest is the organizing you keep.
The tool for the job
An extension that runs in your browser is the simplest path here, and Revapin is built for exactly this. It selects whole boards, respects your sections as folders, and pulls each image at full resolution. Because it works inside your own Chrome window, nothing routes through an outside server. Here's what that gets you:
- Whole boards or hand-picked pins, your choice per download;
- Sections saved as named subfolders, mirroring your board;
- Full-resolution files instead of feed thumbnails.
Organizing by project once it's local
Once the files are on your drive, they behave like any other asset. Rename the folders by client or project, search them with your operating system's own search, open them in Preview or Bridge, and drag them into your layout without a browser in the loop. A local library also works on a plane, in a coffee shop with dead wifi, or five years from now when the original pins are long gone. You built the collection, so keep it somewhere it's actually yours.
Pinterest is where you find references. Your computer is where you use them. Moving a board across that gap takes one download, and after that the whole library is offline, sorted, and full quality.
Revapin is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Pinterest. Pinterest is a trademark of Pinterest, Inc.