DEEP DIVE

The new secrets of Pinterest

Want to know the app’s coolest new features? Put a pin in this.

Pinterest: Lifestyle Ideas

Healthy recipes & home design

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Pinterest has been busy lately, rolling out interesting features designed to improve its organization—and your inspiration.

Here’s how to make the most out of the app right now.

Need that jacket? Snap a picture and the Lens feature will track it down.

Focus your Lens

‣ With the Lens feature, snap an iPhone photo of any product – cocktail dress, set of cabinets, particular species of cactus – and Pinterest will search for and display similar items. Until the app can actually read minds, search doesn’t get more convenient than this.

Search similar objects in an entire room – or crop to search just one.

Search without typing

‣ Visual Search is like the Lens, except for pictures. Open a pin, tap the frame icon and Pinterest will search for and display similar images (to further refine your results, swipe through the tags that appear at the top of the suggestions list).

Visual Search has a cool extra trick up its sleeve: It lets you crop pictures to zero in on a specific person or object. If you have a picture of a kitchen but are only interested in the blender, simply adjust the frame to crop. Pinterest will respond by showing you enough blenders to make a year’s worth of smoothies.

Want to save this dress for later? Touch and hold to Save it.

Save, send and hide your pins

‣ Pinterest offers lots of ways to interact with pins, but few are easier than this: From the home screen, touch and hold on a pin to Save, Send or Hide it (from the pin itself, you can also Save or Send by touching and holding).

Decluttering will make you and your boards much happier.

Declutter your boards

‣ Has your Pinterest gotten too messy to handle? Here are three ways to straighten up your board situation:

The simplest way is to add Sections within a board by tapping the plus sign at the top left of the screen (it’s like adding files to a folder). Use this feature to, say, break down your Weddings board into Dresses, Flowers and Viral Reception Dance Routines.

To reduce the number of boards themselves, try the Merge function: Go to a board, tap the pencil icon and scroll down to Manage (just note that boards you merge will lose their followers).

If you no longer want to see ideas or recommendations based on a board – maybe you’ve discovered you’re terrible at woodworking or your newborn baby is now 9 – you can tap Archive Board to hide it from your profile. Don’t worry, you can unarchive it later.