Tumblr and Pinterest are the best social networks for people who want to become totally immersed in great visual content, but connecting the two so you can pin or post the same content on both platforms can be a tad bit tricky.

From Pinterest to Tumblr, It’s Easy

If you just want to post all your pins from Pinterest to your Tumblr blog, there’s an easy way to automate that process with a handy online automation service called IFTTT (If This Then That). You can build your own IFTTT recipe or simply just use an existing recipe that reads your Pinterest account’s RSS feed and posts any new pins on Tumblr.

From Tumblr to Pinterest, It’s Maybe Not So Easy…

Unfortunately, if you want to do the opposite — pin Tumblr posts to Pinterest — you’ll have to use a different alternative. IFTTT is an absolutely wonderful tool for automating online posts, but since Pinterest only works through the RSS channel and can’t yet be added as a channel itself, IFTTT can’t gain access to your account so that it can automatically pin anything from Tumblr to Pinterest.

This may change in the future, but for now, you’ll have to stick with the next best method: using the Pinterest bookmarklet to easily pin anything you find on Tumblr to your Pinterest boards.

Using the Pinterest Bookmarklet

If you’re not already familiar, Pinterest has a convenient tool that you can use to easily pin anything you see on the web directly to any of your Pinterest boards. It’s called the “Pin It” button, and you can find it by scrolling down through the Pinterest Goodies page.

  • Drag the Pin It button to your web browser’s bookmarks bar.

From the Pinterest Goodies page, click on the Pin It button and simply drag and drop it onto your web browser’s bookmarks bar. You should notice the Pinterest “P” logo show up automatically if you did it right.

  • ​Browse Tumblr until you find something you want to pin on Pinterest.

You can now go ahead and browse through your Tumblr dashboard until you come across anything you’d like to pin. If you are interested in correctly setting the source URLs to all your pins, then you may want to click on the notes on the post to be taken to the actual live blog post so you can pin it from there.

  • Press the Pin It button when you found something to pin and select the image you want to pin.

Once you hit the Pin It button, you’ll be shown a page with all the images pulled from whatever site you were just viewing. (Keep in mind that this method works for all websites — not just Tumblr.) Roll your mouse over the image you want, click the Pin It button that appears over the image and then you’ll be able to select your board and fill in the rest of the details.

Anything you pin through the Pin It button gets pinned right to your boards, so you never have to manually save photos from Tumblr to your computer or mobile device and then upload them to Pinterest. Pinterest also offers some instructional tips on how to install the Pinterest bookmarklet into your iPhone’s web browser.

It sure is a little bit frustrating that there’s no way to automatically publish pins from other places around the web, especially since so many other social networks allow you to do so, but considering how popular Pinterest has become already, better options for automation and board management will likely pop up sometimes in the future. Hang tight with the Pin It tool for now!

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