Saving images from Pinterest

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Imagery of pencils is kind of an important thing for folks around here. It’s nice to have digital copies of images to look at any time. Especially for brands & models of interest. I keep a folder on my computer containing thousands of images, many hundreds of writing instruments. A good many are my own, a bunch are stock photos, and some are copies of collections posted on image sharing sites, auction sites, blogs, social media platforms, etc.

The thing is, when you see an image and save it… how good is it? The two top considerations are resolution and image size. Why save an image 800x600 when you could possibly have one that’s 3000x2000? These days, the size difference in bytes is rather insignificant, given the ample amount of storage offered by computers today. And, if you need a smaller image, you can always shrink it (either with installed image software, or by using free websites that offer a variety of free filters and functions).

One of the common sites used for sharing images is Pinterest. I haven’t used it much, but I’ve recently started thinking about exploring options. My primary used to be Photobucket, which gave a decent amount of free space and somewhat useful image folder organization. But, they ditched their free model and now charge for it. So I moved onto PostImages.org. And that one isn’t bad, for its image organization. They do have some ads, but they’re not terribly intrusive. However, they occasionally have some down time. I’ve since started using Imgur, which is great for creating multi-image story boards. You can provide many images grouped together, each with their own long description fields. Plus, you can also interweave in video files (with the one painful caveat–can’t let videos go beyond 1 minute… which means breaking them up).

TL;DR
I think at least one or two people here on Knockology use Pinterest (or at least used to), as I’ve found many vintage pencil and pen images there over the years. And I’ve saved many images from there. What’s vexing is sometimes getting an image link that once expanded doesn’t get much larger… when it’s likely that there might be a larger size.

Here’s an example:
“i.pinimg.com/736x/23/9e/75/239e758d4be901460ca4299435c93fcf.jpg”

That’s an image of some Hi Uni pencils - 2050, 3050, 3051, and 5050. You see in the URL that “736x”? That means the maximum length will be 736 pixels. Using Google Images, I was able to search on the URL, and sure enough a larger size appeared in the results.

“i.pinimg.com/1200x/23/9e/75/239e758d4be901460ca4299435c93fcf.jpg”

Nice. 1200 pixels long is definitely better. I then figured… maybe there are larger ones? So I plugged in a bunch of numbers… and nothing worked. And then, by a stroke of luck… with a different image that I searched on, I found I got a much larger image. I copied and pasted it in an editor and saw 2978 pixels! The URL didn’t have that size. When I replaced 1200x with 2978x, it didn’t work. And then I found it. “originals” was the key.

“i.pinimg.com/originals/23/9e/75/239e758d4be901460ca4299435c93fcf.jpg”

I tried it out on a handful of other images I was looking at. They all returned larger images than the expanded version Pinterest delivered. So I think this technique should work for many more.

Try it out and let me know if you have success. :blush:

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As a follow-up to this…

The web tries to mitigate bandwidth consumption by delivering low quality images that are passable. For most people, it’s no problem. You’re just viewing and then move on. But what if you want to store that image? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a better quality copy?

One technique is to use some parameters in the URL. There are some parameters that are designed to reduce the size of the image or increase compression. You’ll see height and width parameters, and even a quality parameter (e.g. q=80). Sometimes you can just strip those out completely, and then you’ll get a larger quality image. Yet, sometimes the parameter system is more sophisticated. Some of them use a signature key… and that signature key is coded to the predefined size intended. So if you change the parameters, the URL breaks. One such site is independent.co.uk. They’re a news site and their image size restriction is beastly. I’ve given up on trying to get around it.

Sometimes you’ll see a URL with a series of parameters that are affecting image size and quality, but they use a folder structure. And then at the end of it is a URL that contains the image reference. Well, just copy off that last URL and then open up the file with that. Often you’ll get the larger quality image that way.

One other thing is the image file extension. JPG and PNG are most common. PNG is less lossy than JPG (unless the JPG has the lowest compression setting). On some sites you will actually see a “.jpg” for the extension, but when you go to save it… you get a “.webp” file type instead. That’s a lossy file format. Another one is “.avif”. Now, sometimes you’ll see parameters in the URL that set “webp”. Something like “format=webp&auto=webp”. If you change “webp” to “jpg”, “jpeg”, “pjpg” or “png”, you can sometimes get that larger quality image. Sometimes there are no extension modifiers… and you can add your own, which on occasion will actually work. With some sites those extension modifiers won’t do anything. I’ve sometimes found on some sites that if you put in a “tif” modifier (which is for TIFF files, no compression) like “format=tif&auto=tif”, you actually get a PNG file in return.

Sometimes trying to override the extension doesn’t work, no matter what parameter you put in. And then that… leads me to the “last case scenario.” And that means employing a 3rd party website. Now, there are a number of them out on the web and some of them are shady or don’t do a good job. In my experience, “ezgif.com” is safe and works well. What’s really great about it is the flexibility. There’s a tab for “webp” and also for “avif.” Under those tabs, you can select the extension you want, like JPG or PNG. And if you want, you can take an MP4 and convert it to a GIF. Note that for JPG, it defaults to a 90 quality factor. Move it up to 100 for the best. What’s cool about this site is that it offers a number of other tools to edit the image, like cropping, resizing, rotation, effects, overlays, and so on.

One last thing… and that is “images.google.com” versus “Bing Images”. I’ve generally found Google to be easier to navigate, but lately they’ve changed some of their image searching pages and it can be cumbersome to find the larger image you want. Well, I’ve gone over to Bing (Microsoft) and discovered they’ve advanced quite a lot. You can select an image from a site and if there are multiple version sizes… you can get them to be laid out for selection and then saved. You can also do some sophisticated image searching there. More than half the time I can get a better quality image through Bing. But not always. And so, it’s nice to leverage both of them.

Anyway, thought I’d drop this info here for my fellow writing instrument collector pals. Have fun!

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Thanks for posting all of this! I’m not on my computer now, but will have to try some of your tips and methods when I get on it. I have been wondering if better results could be found with Bing.

I need to double check for my own trials, but I thought a webp extension actually saved an image of the webpage and not the picture I was trying to save. I thought I’ve also tried changing the extension, but will need to try that again.

Do you ever add notes as to where you found the images or other info about the image or website? I’ve failed to do that and regretted it later. (Same when finding a website or information.) I had found these cool Pentel Tradio models on a resale site, as well as info on another site, but didn’t bookmark or write down the related information and now I either can’t find it again and/or it was removed. (One was on a resale site and the other talked about them being a special regional item.)

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You’re welcome! Glad you found it useful. The “.webp” extension is only images, not whole page captures (which would be more like a screenshot). And yes, you could opt to change the extension when saving, like “.jpg”, but all that would do is put a “.webp” encoded image on your computer with a “.jpg” extension. Clicking on it will load in your browser just fine, but if you try to edit it… your image editor will say it doesn’t recognize the image file (extension conflicts with the encoding).

Do you ever add notes as to where you found the images or other info about the image or website? I’ve failed to do that and regretted it later. (Same when finding a website or information.) I had found these cool Pentel Tradio models on a resale site, as well as info on another site, but didn’t bookmark or write down the related information and now I either can’t find it again and/or it was removed. (One was on a resale site and the other talked about them being a special regional item.)

That’s a good point to make and no… unfortunately I very rarely add notes. You could easily do that by going into the properties of the image file and put in tags or even content in the notes/description. I really should’ve done that. Sometimes you get lucky and it will be prefilled. But before I knew how to get around image extensions, I’d do a copy/paste of the image into an editor and then save it… which loses all original meta data. Now that you’ve mentioned it, I think I may go ahead and add meta data (if I can remember it) as I go through images in the future. Sometimes some images will carry a certain aesthetic that you can remember, but… years later? Maybe not. For example, the Monogusa Museum from Japan. The person who posted these many years ago was an early collector who snapped up so many great mechanical pencil models, back in the days when they were more accessible with less bidding competition… but of course, high proxy buying fees made it harder for overseas people to acquire them. Anyway, lots of great photos provided there. A very specific and consistent lighting for most. Unfortunately, they’re not really high resolution and there’s no way to get them. At one point, I saw some of these pencils for sale on YAJ, with an account that was something like “monogusa”. I tried contacting them, but got no reply.

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I was able to copy the image and then use Google to do an image search on it… and it turned up a website hosted in Lithuanian. HERE.

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But searching on “Pentel Tradio” and “floral, flower, flowers” didn’t turn up any hits. One other thing you can do… if it wasn’t long ago that you viewed the listing, is to go back through your browser history. Search on “pentel” and that might help narrow the results.

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Thanks Gary, that answered a lot of questions

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Good find! I’m not sure if I came across that one before or not. I saw the colors on a resale site and they were already sold out when I saw them. I did look again at that site, but they no longer showed up. The whitish ones I think might also have been Lithuania, but they had a different name, relative to the patterns on them.

It was just over a year ago. I was on my phone, so I doubt it would still be there. I will do searches at times of opportunity, and then forget later. (I had kept a bunch of tabs open, but then accidentally closed them all!)

Thanks again!

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Ouch! Yeah, that’s too long. Probably long gone. And frankly, if they were pens listed for sale, I imagine the discontinuation means they won’t be returning… at least on any retail websites.

I’m on Windows 11, and while I think the operating system is terrific in many respects (very stable, easily updated), there are still features that are lacking. My biggest pet peeve is file management. And in that regard, duplicates. I wish there was an easy way to locate duplicate files and then mark for deletion (you can review and then execute). I’ve accidentally saved off the same files, having forgotten that I’d saved them before, and used different naming conventions.

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