Pinterest and the Lineup
A three-day grid, variants that fan one frame across boards, and a server that pins whether or not your Mac is awake.
Updated Aug 14, 20266 min readApplies to 1.1.5
Pinterest pays the longest dividends of anything you post. One pin can send traffic to your site for years. The Lineup is what turns that from an occasional scramble into something you do on a Tuesday.
Nine and a half minutes on everything Share sends out on a schedule, Pinterest and Instagram both. The Lineup starts it.
Connecting
Settings, chapter 06, The Channels. The PINTEREST · CONNECT row holds a Connect Pinterest button. Sign in to your Pinterest business account, approve the scopes, and your boards load. The row below it lists the permissions you granted, read only.
You're using our shared les Archives Pinterest app. Nothing to set up at
developers.pinterest.com.
Two more rows in the same chapter matter here. DEFAULT BOARD is where new pins land when you haven't picked one. DEFAULT DESTINATION URL is the click-through link attached to a pin when the frame carries nothing of its own.
The Lineup
Share, Pinterest, The Lineup. A three-day rolling grid starting today. Days run across the top. The rows are your daily slots, and how many there are comes from PINS PER DAY in Settings, chapter 05, The Schedule.
The row labels are blank on purpose. The time column was shrunk to a margin because photographers plan Pinterest in slots per day rather than in nine o'clocks. The real time on any pin is visible, and editable, in the Pin Detail editor.
The header carries the title and the date range on the left, and the counts on the right: Drafts, Scheduled, Posted, and Failed when there are failures. Failed is the one you can click; it jumps to the first broken pin. The sixty-day density strip lives in that header too, not along the bottom. Click any segment to jump the visible window to that day.
The left panel is an archive picker scoped to Pinterest, with its own search and filters, and a PIN ALL button for everything you've selected.
Scheduling a pin
Drag a frame from the picker onto an open slot. The Pin Detail editor opens on the right with five fields.
| Field | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Board | Empty. Pick one from the menu |
| Scheduled time | A full date and time picker, pre-set to the slot you dropped on |
| Caption | Written for you from the frame's Pinterest caption, editable, 500 characters |
| Destination URL | Resolved from the frame, or your default |
| Alt text | From the frame |
Under the caption sit a template menu and a strip of suggested keyword chips. Below the fields, APPROVE PIN and REMOVE FROM LINEUP.
The destination URL is resolved in three steps, and the first one that has a value wins:
- The frame's blog feature URL
- The frame's gallery URL
- Your default destination URL from The Channels
If none of the three is set, the pin goes out without a link.
Multi-drop
Cmd click several frames in the picker and drag the whole selection onto one slot. We queue one pin per frame into consecutive open slots.
Dragging a frame that already sits in the Lineup doesn't create a duplicate; it is skipped. Dropping a single pin onto a slot that's already taken is refused outright rather than quietly slid to the next slot, and you get a message saying so. Multi-drops still fan out, because that's the point of them.
Cmd click pins already on the grid and a bar appears along the bottom with APPROVE, ASSIGN BOARD, EDIT CAPTION and REMOVE.
Pin variants
Right-click a thumbnail in the picker and choose Create Pin Variants…. How you fan one frame across several boards on staggered days.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Number of variants | A stepper, two to six |
| Days between variants | A stepper, one to ninety, fourteen by default |
| Boards | Multi-select. Nothing is pre-picked; the list starts empty |
| Variant strategy | Optional, if you have one saved |
Two things about that modal are worth being blunt about.
In manual mode, meaning no saved strategy selected, the variant count is ignored. You get exactly one variant per board you tick. If you want three variants, tick three boards.
Every variant carries the same caption. Captions aren't rewritten per board. The only way a variant gets different words is a saved strategy step that supplies a literal override.
Variant strategies
A saved recipe: a name, then steps of day offset plus preferred board. One ships with the app, 3-board spread, at days 0, 14 and 30, with no preset boards.
The shipping Settings has no strategy editor. The one that exists lives in a screen that's never presented. Treat the shipped strategy as the only one for now.
Caption templates and smart keywords
Two things inside Pin Detail that make caption writing a click instead of a chore.
Caption templates are reusable recipes with tokens like {couple},
{venue}, {location} and {season}. Three ship with the app: Venue-led,
Couple-led and Plain. You cannot add your own yet.
Smart keywords is a strip of SEO phrases pulled from that frame's own catalog metadata, meaning its location, venue, season and subject. Click one to drop it into the caption. The chips change per frame, so what's offered is always about the picture in front of you. Hashtags are deliberately absent here. Pinterest's discovery doesn't reward them the way Instagram's does.
By Board
Toggle from The Lineup to By Board in the top bar. Every board you own as a card with its pin count, when you last pinned to it, and fresh-content stats. Heart the ones you use and they sort to the top. Click into one for a pinning surface scoped to just that board.
By Board keeps its own schedule. A pin staged there doesn't block a Lineup drop, and the other way round.
What actually publishes
Approved pins go out at their slot, from our server, every time.
Cloud publishing is always on. It isn't a setting, there's no toggle for it anywhere in the app, and it can't be turned off. The in-app publisher still exists in the code as an emergency fallback, but it returns immediately and never fires while the server path is live, which is always. Your Mac can be shut, asleep, or on a plane. The pins still go.
You can see the state of it in Settings, chapter 07, The Machinery, on the system status panel, where CLOUD PUBLISHING reads Running. That tile is a read-out, not a switch.
A pin that fails turns its Lineup tile red with the reason, and offers a one-click fix: reconnect Pinterest, swap the image, or just retry. Retrying requeues it with fresh timing.
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